Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Gerrit Kolb, CEO of CoreMedia (Part 4)

Gerrit Kolb: You asked about the completeness of the e-commerce platform. How do you integrate and what is the mechanism? There are basically two ways you can integrate. It’s typically referred to as who owns the glass. Some vendors go in and they say, “We’ve got to control the glass because the experience is so important.” The shopping element of e-commerce is reduced to an API calling. You own the whole experience from an event content management and a web experience management platform. Then you’re doing the call-outs to the back end e-commerce system.

The other thing, which is actually something that is important is that whoever is big in this business, has probably been in business for more than two or three years. One of our customers is a company called Office Depot. They’re the fifth largest retailer in North America. They generate >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Gerrit Kolb, CEO of CoreMedia (Part 3)

Gerrit Kolb: Basically, there are two outcomes. Number one is that the story that you’re telling allows you to create packages that are combined with stories that are entertaining and sticky for the customer. The customer comes back because he wants to hear the stories about specific areas of interest. Secondly, people are able to find you because the SEO optimization doesn’t have to trickle. We have real content. At the heart of it, you have to have the ability to tell stories. Stories are always combined with text copies. They’re always rich media. There’s always pictures. There’s social commenting and rating. All of these things make a story engaging and compelling. That is the key for the retailers to survive. That’s a huge development. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Gerrit Kolb, CEO of CoreMedia (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Help me understand the correlation with e-commerce.

Gerrit Kolb: Typically, e-commerce solutions deal with making the product catalog available through a website. You end up having a grid where you can pick which product you want, what color you want, what quality you want, and what size you want. Then you have a shopping cart that lets you check out. This is really the cash register from a brick-and-mortar store perspective. What is missing, and this is something that is key to all the e-commerce solutions today, is everything that drives your customer to your website. That actually deals with motivating people to buy from you. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Gerrit Kolb, CEO of CoreMedia (Part 1)

You have heard me talk about a vision for Web 3.0 since 2007, when I first published my Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS) equation. In this interview, we discuss how the systems behind the scene are coming along to make a full Web 3.0 user experience possible.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some introduction about your company CoreMedia. Let’s introduce our audience to yourself as well as to the company.

Gerrit Kolb: CoreMedia has been in business for about 19 years. At the very beginning of the Internet, CoreMedia started to develop software that was related to the management of structured content. That was quickly picked up by most of the media and telco companies in Central Europe. CoreMedia became, I would say, the heart and soul and the backbone of most of the media sites operating in Central Europe. As I said, our roots are media and telco, which is typically where the leading edge >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Darren Hill, CEO of WebLinc (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What are you able to do? What strategies do you follow to make that an instant fit in some sense on the mobile phone?

Darren Hill: If you think about products, products have attributes and tags. The consumer uses those tags to find products on the website. The biggest thing we’re doing is tagging the customer. We look at searches that the customer makes based on past purchases, the last place the customer has been, or even the way they shop. Some shoppers are shopping for something very specific. Some shoppers are shopping to fill their closets. Some shoppers are buying gifts. We’re doing a lot of work to identify what type of shoppers are here. Those shoppers actually respond differently to different page layouts. Someone who’s buying just a pair of jeans is much interested in seeing those jeans >>>

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 4)

Sramana Mitra: I see it.

Darren Hill: It’s quite powerful. People share them like crazy. Our site allows hearting and comments and the customer base is very active.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. When you put something up on the website, I’m sure you are seeing huge amounts of social media sharing.

Darren Hill: Absolutely. That is the key. That was almost a by-product of allowing people to upload their information. The big value was that these girls are excited that they’re on the Free People site. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Darren Hill, CEO of WebLinc (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s fast forward to 2014. What is your business today?

Darren Hill: 2014 is an interesting transitional year for us. We had been in business for 20 years. All of the growth that we had, which was pretty significant, was organic. We invested all of our profits back into the business and never took any outside investment up until last year [2014]. Last year was the first time that we did take outside investments.

Sramana Mitra: What is your business?

Darren Hill: We have an e-commerce platform. Companies hire us to use that e-commerce platform for their business. It controls everything that their online store is doing. It controls the front-end—what the customers sees and what the customer interacts with. >>>