Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Barry Adika, CEO of Brandefender (Part 4)

Barry Adika: Amazon decided to freeze some accounts that don’t have proper documentation. For these sellers, to photoshop an invoice is not a big deal. There’s no enforcement on Amazon’s side. That’s why they have six million members currently.

Long story short, those guys got smarter. Let’s say you have a big Amazon account. It’s millions of dollars in inventory and millions of dollars in pending payments.

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Barry Adika, CEO of Brandefender (Part 3)

Barry Adika: The second algorithm we built was for counterfeit detection based on image recognition. We teach the AI what to look for. There is such diverse information that we teach this AI to look for and bring us results.

On some occasions, because search is built by many elements like price, quantity, and reviews, we need to know how to sort this data to get to where you want to be.

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Barry Adika, CEO of Brandefender (Part 2)

Barry Adika: We didn’t just look for seller information on Amazon. We looked for counterfeit products, quantities that people post online that can raise a red flag for brands.

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Barry Adika, CEO of Brandefender (Part 1)

Brand fraud is rampant in e-commerce. Barry discusses brand protection.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself and to Brandefender. 

Barry Adika: I’m the Co-Founder of Brandefender. We focus on brand protection in general. We are experts in cyber security. I used to be in retail and wholesale. I’ve been engaging with the big shift that’s happening in retail over the last few years.

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jimmy Duvall, Chief Product Officer of BigCommerce (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I can think of two entrepreneurs that I’ve talked to within our program who would appreciate talking to BigCommerce about what they’re doing. But taking advantage of your ecosystem, how do we connect these dots and how do we explore such opportunities?

Jimmy Duvall: On a personal level, I’ve worked with TechStars. I am a big proponent of this engagement model of helping these entrepreneurs find their way in a sea of everything.

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jimmy Duvall, Chief Product Officer of BigCommerce (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What about logistics? That must be another area where Amazon is a player that you have to interface with.

Jimmy Duvall: Absolutely. They help our retailers handle logistics and fulfillment. It is part of what is this integration that we have with Amazon around the marketplace. It’s a value-add for our customers in many ways.

Amazon is pretty restrictive, in many ways, about who they allow to do what. Obviously for the larger customers that have volume, those logistics and fulfillment capabilities are really core.

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jimmy Duvall, Chief Product Officer of BigCommerce (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How many developers are developing on your ecosystem?

Jimmy Duvall: We have over 300 partners. I can’t necessarily extrapolate that into numbers of developers, but it’s got to be in thousands. We are onboarding everything from design agencies to consultancies like Accenture.

Just a quick anecdote, we were in London last week. We had 250 partners that crossed both the technology vendor ecosystem as well as agencies that really support retailers that are extending, customizing, and making it unique.

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jimmy Duvall, Chief Product Officer of BigCommerce (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What are some other examples of the kinds of platform extensions you’re seeing being delivered through the ecosystem? You mentioned difference of pricing as one.

You were describing how the platform is being extended. I’m just curious. On the path of growing an e-commerce company, what other solutions are required?

Jimmy Duvall: This might be an extreme but I think it’s going to represent the flexibility of what I’m speaking of. One of the core strategies that I brought into the company was how to create an open platform.