Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Not all categories of e-commerce have very slim margins. We’ve got great stories of bootstrapped e-commerce companies. I think in your case, pet foods doesn’t have a lot of margin.

Joe Speiser: It doesn’t. When we started, the gross margins on pet food were actually very high. But it’s the shipping that takes away most of it. Then, you also have incidental things like materials and software to run the warehouse. Before you know it, there’s a re-haul and you take a big step back. There’s a lot of things that go into it.

That being said, we knew that we wanted to scale this business fast and we needed more money for advertising to do it. We raised a round with Lightspeed Ventures in 2011. I think it was July. With that money, we were able to bring on additional help. We hired Mike. He’s now our President. He’s been promoted multiple times throughout the last few years. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Bob Dufour, President of Fusion (Part 7)

Bob Dufour: It’s having someone who can start understanding the psychology of that consumer and the opportunities presented to digital retailers. At least in my experience, that’s a big missing gap for somebody who really understands those needs during that journey, especially as millennials start taking hold and as their purchasing power gets bigger. I think they’re used to 99 cents. Trying to sell something for $30 is going to be a real shock to them. These microproducts with microprices is going to be important. Technology integration, cross-device integration, and digital enablement of suppliers—those are the things that I would say are opportunities that jump out based on our business.

Sramana Mitra: Listening to you, I’m thinking about this article that I wrote a long time ago in 2007 for the first time. It’s a definition of Web 3.0 that I came up with, which is a formula: 4C + P + VS. The four Cs are content, community, commerce, context, with personalization and vertical search. You may want to look up some of that writing because a lot of what you’re saying is the commerce elements driving off any context.
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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Bob Dufour, President of Fusion (Part 6)

Bob Dufour: Another one that we see a lot is the ability to easily connect partners. I think there’s a technical integration opportunity out there for showing how people can connect. Those are all tied together. Having the products in this ancillary space, having the product suppliers, being digitally enabled, and having technical connections that can be universally plugged in or unplugged. That will make all those transactions work a little bit easier.

There are two other things that I think are opportunities. One of them is cross-device. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brian Dhatt, CTO of Borderfree (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: It’s still a whole lot of cans right now because the delivery rates are going down. The spam volumes are going up. The inbox is becoming a total nightmare.

Brian Dhatt: It depends on your approach. I think there are emails that consumers value and still want to look at every single day. I think it depends a lot on if you’re pushing personalized and relevant content to the consumer. If so, they’re going to open up your email. I do agree with you. There are many folks out there that still take the approach of sending daily emails. It’s got this generic marketing message or generic merchandising. As a consumer, if you think you’re going to see things that are pertinent to you, you’re going to open that mail everyday.

Sramana Mitra: Honestly, it’s really not viable for people to keep on top of emails anymore given the level of spam. I just look at my inbox and the number of people who are adding me to their mailing list and I have to sit there and unsubscribe from the mailing list all the time. That is an uncontrollable volume of trash that comes over. This is true about everybody these days. That is really taking away from the effectiveness of email marketing.
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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brian Dhatt, CTO of Borderfree (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Is there any other point that you want to make? Are there any open problems that you are seeing, trying to solve, or want to see entrepreneurs solve?

Brian Dhatt: The other big one that is worth discussing might be mobile, which I know you’re probably hearing a lot about. The funny thing is, outside of the United States, you see a completely different world of mobile. We’re seeing folks transacting inside of chatting applications like WeChat. This is something that hasn’t come to the United States yet. We typically are going direct to merchant websites. You’re not transacting outside those experiences. Moving towards a community-based, content-driven model for commerce is happening aggressively outside the United States. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brian Dhatt, CTO of Borderfree (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: So you calculate duties based on data that you have. You collect that duty when you deliver the goods and pay the duty after the fact.

Brian Dhatt: We show it to them right during checkout. If you’re checking out on J.Crew, you’ll see the duties that would be assessed and pay for them right then. Anything above and beyond that, we actually get billed by the government or by the carriers. We will pay no matter what that duty comes in as.

Sramana Mitra: If you have under-assessed the duty, then you’re going to be taking responsibility for that?

Brian Dhatt: Exactly.

Sramana Mitra: How often does that happen?
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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brian Dhatt, CTO of Borderfree (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Because you’re at Borderfree, your angle is on the international. We will explore that angle, but I just want to anchor this discussion by pointing out a few other things that I see in e-commerce. We started covering these quite extensively actually. Very recently, we have covered two companies that are each furthering the evolution of high-end e-commerce systems—0ne from the dimension of personalization and another from the dimension of content-driven commerce. Both are massive trends.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with this piece that I wrote in 2007 defining what I see as the formula for Web 3.0. The formula was Web 3.0 = 4C + P + VS. The four Cs are defined as context, community, commerce, and content. P is personalization and VS for vertical search. Now eight years later, we are starting to see systems that address not all of it but >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jeff Cohen, General Manager of CampusBooks (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What I see here, which is interesting actually, talks to a similar trend. It’s a significant opportunity out there. There are tons of people in tons of different verticals who have built followings. Maybe, they could be traffic followings. It could be a blog that has a readership. It could be various kinds of social media following. There are influencers of various scale and levels of influence in all kinds of niches. I believe that there is an opportunity at this stage of the game to create technology, product, or services through which these influencers can monetize their assets. I think that’s what you’re doing—taking advantage of that influencer pool out there who can drive commerce basically.
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