Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Rick Wilson, President of Miva Merchant (Part 6)

Rick Wilson: The trend we see there is that they want to go direct. They want to build a community around their product. I think Kickstarter has really brought that down even from the million dollar plus range to the zero dollar plus range where you can do a product video, get a personality out there, and build a community. Once you build a community, you have enough momentum to go figure out the logistics. If you’re selling a single SKU, outsourcing fulfillment is easy. If you’re selling jewelry and you have 5,000 SKUs, it gets a little more challenging. Even all of those problems are now solvable by one to five person teams, which was impossible a decade ago.

Sramana Mitra: I would say e-commerce is probably the domain that is seeing the maximum impact of ultra-light startups. Would you agree with that? >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Rick Wilson, President of Miva Merchant (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: If you were to tell us what you’re seeing in your customer base, what are some of the big trends that you’re seeing right now?

Rick Wilson: There are some broad industry trends that are fairly ubiquitous. Most online stores today are becoming multi-channel. They’re going to be selling through their own store, marketplaces, or may very well be selling in the offline world. Roughly a third of our customers have a brick-and-mortar presence. I think the sense of either a pure play e-tailer or not is gone. People understand that e-commerce is a technology that enables streamlining of your business. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Rick Wilson, President of Miva Merchant (Part 4)

Rick Wilson: On one hand, you have this free-wheeling, open source world where as long as someone knows what they’re doing, they can literally do anything. On the other hand, you have what I call apple-ification where all of the hard choices have been made for you. There’s some brilliance to that for sure. The successes of Shopify, Bigcommerce, and Volution have shown that there’s a demand for that. I would say that’s the biggest change in the last seven years. Today, to be an e-commerce owner, you don’t have to be a particularly technical person whereas in 2007, you needed to be somewhat technical. If you go back farther than that, you absolutely had to be technical to have an advantage.

Sramana Mitra: That’s correct. Shopify and Volution are catering to the more starting merchants. Bigcommerce is catering to the slightly larger sweet spot of $1 million to $30 million revenue. Magento is the larger player. Where do you fit into that picture? >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Rick Wilson, President of Miva Merchant (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In 2007, what was the landscape in the e-commerce shopping cart or the e-commerce platform world? What was going on around you? What was the competitive landscape? Whom did you compete with directly and indirectly?

Rick Wilson: Yahoo stores was still a popular platform. I wouldn’t say that it had momentum, but it was certainly popular. The osCommerce software, which had been very popular, had faltered. I was never a big osCommerce guy, so I can’t remember if they released version three or four. They were in between major versions and it just died on the vine. They never got the major version out. I think Magento’s alpha was announced during that time. Shopify was just starting to arrive on the scene. I heard about them in 2008. Volution was probably the earliest success story as a pure play Software as a Service platform provider in our space. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: However, right now it’s very inadequate. We only actually do content marketing. Our strategy, in terms of marketing, does not consist of advertising. However, the infrastructure around that content marketing in terms of analytics and being able to tie those pieces together is absolutely and terribly difficult.

Larry Augustin: That’s an interesting comment on your part. This is a digression for our discussion today. I see content marketing as incredibly valuable. I agree with you that we’re just at the beginning of an industry of the right tools to really help and enable content marketing in a significant way. That said, I think content marketing is a piece of an overall strategy. We have to understand sometimes that a tool like content marketing, which is still early, is one of the set of tools in the toolbox. I have in fact >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM (Part 6)

Larry Augustin: What we find is that the open platform makes that very easy for anyone coming in. And that community buids very early integrations. Twitter is a great example. We had a Twitter integration available for our product long before most of us here even knew what Twitter was. It’s now part of the product, but it started out in that open developer ecosystem. That’s been a great success for us and that’s one of the reasons that we’re in business.

Sramana Mitra: That’s a good segue into my next question. You are in a very interesting vantage point to call out and introduce our audience to stuff that is happening now that are especially innovative. You talked about Twitter, D&B, Data.com type of integrations, which are kind of established partners at this point. What is the most interesting, exciting, and cool innovations that you’ve seen on that platform that’s from a startup?

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: There’s a ridiculous amount of spam that comes through as well and that’s why that tool needs to be able to distinguish between spam and real customer opportunities where a client wants to talk to you.

Larry Augustin: Yes, I agree, all of those are opportunities for innovation in the industry. I think, as an industry, we’re just at the beginning of those pieces. Here, our goal has been to build a platform which can pull those pieces together, integrate them well, and create a great dashboard – whether it’s mobile or desktop – for the individual to view all of those pieces and pull them together. Some of it is internal data. A lot of data are external. How do you correlate those difference sources? We have architected a platform that enables all of those pieces.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Switching gears a little bit, I’m going to give you a scenario which I am experiencing based on our own process of sales and marketing, which uses LinkedIn centrally. We use LinkedIn community’s ability to market and sell subtly. I’m a LinkedIn influencer. Content marketing happens to be one of our primary strategies of how we are building our brand. This is probably why you knew about us before today’s call. We have a very active blog. We have very active social media channels where every hour, we put a good piece of content out there in social media. That flows through using technologies like Hootsuite.

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