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 5)

Sramana Mitra: How do you do the recommendation on what goes with what? Is that a manual recommendation system or is there technology that enables scaling of something like that?

Darren Hill: It’s a mix. There are several data points that go into it such as what people have bought and what they have looked at. That’s the easy one and something that everybody’s been doing for years. The shoppers can put products together in their own category. They’re being a stylist, if you will, on the site. We use that data as well. We are able to see which customer is the best stylist based on how much sales is generated through what they’re suggesting. Then we have professional stylists who work there. They’re also putting this information in. We essentially take those data points and make the suggestion based on all of that. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Darren Hill, CEO of WebLinc (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Besides geography, what other parameters do you personalize on?

Darren Hill: For a lot of our fashion clients, we personalize on sizes. For instance, if you have come to the website and you’ve looked for a specific pair of shoes, we’ll actually tag your account and we’ll know what shoe size you are. So the next time you look at shoes, we will filter and sort that specific shoe category. We will make sure that the shoes at the top are available and are in sizes that you indicated that you were interested in. That simple little tweak can increase the conversion rate by about double for specific clients. That is pretty significant.

Sramana Mitra: What else in fashion is interesting in terms of personalization? I’ve started one of the first Internet fashion companies about 15 years ago. I know this category cold. What are you seeing in terms of trends? I’m a big believer in online >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Suchit Bachalli, CEO of Unilog (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The other interesting slice of the market view that you’ve provided is this whole world of people who are not doing e-commerce. They’re slow adopters that you’re now bringing fresh onto the Internet. That’s a very interesting world. Given that you’re operating in a territory that is a lot more behind than where a lot of the early adopter market is, what other white space areas do you see in your orbit where you would point entrepreneurs who are starting today to look at providing solutions?

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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Suchit Bachalli, CEO of Unilog (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: As your primary playing ground, right?

Suchit Bachalli: Right. One of our earlier adopters Mayer Electric are based out of Birmingham, Alabama. I think they’re $800 million in revenue. They just had a regular website. There was no commerce and no way to buy anything online. Today, they have the full commerce solution. They have a native mobile app. Interestingly, one of the things they do is tool crib management on site. They use our application. Boeing would just use our mobile app to scan your PC codes and do fulfillment purchasing. Refreshments would be ordered through the mobile app.

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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Suchit Bachalli, CEO of Unilog (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: We’re with you. One thing you’ll find is that our audience is a sophisticated audience. We know the space. I got your point that you are trying to provide something that is more comprehensive to the mid-market that can give a lot of the functionalities that is available in the higher-end of the market at a fraction of the cost. My question is, given that is your positioning, are you telling me that there is no other player in that market? That’s hard to believe.

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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Suchit Bachalli, CEO of Unilog (Part 2)

Suchit Bachalli: If you look at Grainger or Staples, they spend hundreds of millions of dollars in building that ecosystem. That ecosystem is built brick by brick, block by block with a wide variety of software products. Now, let’s look at the SMB space, say someone who has $600 million in revenue. They’re a B2B wholesale distribution company and the type of company you’ve never heard of because their idea of marketing is a barbecue Sunday. These are companies that have $600 million in revenue and 40 locations nationwide. They have city counters where you can buy anything from valves to gaskets to electrical wiring. They sell to other businesses.

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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Suchit Bachalli, CEO of Unilog (Part 1)

Suchit has bootstrapped a very interesting e-commerce platform company using services that today caters to the B2B e-commerce needs of backwater industrial customers. It’s a fascinating window in to a world we don’t hear much about.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to Unilog. What do you do? What trends do you align with?

Suchit Bachalli: I’ll start by talking a little bit about the Unilog journey and how we’ve come to be where we are. I think it sets the stage for where we think we’re going. Unilog is a 16-year-old company. For the first 13 years of our life, we were a knowledge process outsourcing outfit out of Bangalore. >>>