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 4)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like there are three or four different aspects that are issues. One is the payment and the whole currency management aspect. The other is shipping and who is considered as a trusted source for shipping.

Brian Dhatt: On the shipping and the compliance side, that’s a big deal to folks. The typical experience was you would either receive a notice from a customs body that says they’re holding your package until you pay more, or you would actually receive the item and then some weeks later, receive a bill from the government. That’s a horrible experience especially when you don’t know in advance what that bill is going to look like. We moved to a model where we moved that pricing right up front. You see it as part of the transaction. The item shows up on your doorstep just like it should without any additional problems. It’s the same for restricted items. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brian Dhatt, CTO of Borderfree (Part 3)

Brian Dhatt: From a personalization perspective, you can go down to the complex individualized personalization. In the first stage, a lot of times, we can do a lot of personalization as part of the site experience based on things like different seasons globally. For example, in Australia you might be looking for a bikini whereas in New York, you don’t have any desire to do that. We actually think that will play a big role for global merchants.

Sramana Mitra: WebLink has a lot of customers in the apparel space. Personalization based on size is one of the big drivers of lift in terms of financial metrics.

Brian Dhatt: Absolutely. You can only imagine that in the global space, it gets more complex. >>>

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: Brian Dhatt, CTO of Borderfree (Part 1)

Borderfree provides tools to help move e-commerce to its next phase: going global. Read on!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to you a little bit as well as all your different e-commerce-related experience so we can set the context for the conversation.

Brian Dhatt: I’m the CTO at Borderfree. That means I’m responsible for our product and product strategy. We are based in New York City and we have offices around the world in Dublin, Ireland as well as in Tel Aviv, Israel. From a path perspective, I came from Gilt Groupe. I led product, engineering, and creatives for Gilt City.

Prior to that, I co-founded POPSUGAR, which is a content commerce company based in San Francisco. We founded that back in 2006 and we were Sequoia-funded. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Keith Anderson, VP Strategy of Profitero (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let me see if I’ve got this. You help retailers with pricing information and you help manufacturers optimize their channels through these retailers. Is that a good summary?

Keith Anderson: That’s a great summary. The retailers also care about assortment. We can also help them, very efficiently, identify products that they don’t carry and that their competitors carry that may be selling well and or that shoppers have reviewed positively. The retailers are getting more sophisticated in how they leverage our capability but it’s primarily about price and assortment for the retailers. For the brands, it’s an even broader set of analytics that they care about.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down a bit and give us the kinds of insights that you are able to extract for pricing optimization.
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Web 3.0 and E-Commerce Investment Thesis of 3 VCs

Last fall, we had three VCs participate in our 1M/1M roundtables to discuss their Web 3.0 and e-Commerce investment thesis. These interviews cover as well as build upon the themes discussed in my two recent books, Billion Dollar Unicorns and From E-Commerce to Web 3.0. If you are looking to build a Unicorn company in the Web 3.0 / e-Commerce domains, I strongly recommend you listen to these three interviews. In each case, listening to just the first 30 minutes would be adequate.

Discussion with Gus Tai, Trinity Ventures

Gus talks about his (and Trinity’s) investment thesis around e-commerce over the years – from BlueNile in 1999, to Zulily, Dot and Bo, and Callisto Media more recently, and what he anticipates for the future. Blue Nile, by the way, is a classic case study of a true Web 3.0 company, and it was a contrarian investment thesis from Trinity to invest in the business. Find out more in the discussion below.

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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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