Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Mark Lavelle, CEO of Magento Commerce (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The model you’re talking about existed and Nordstrom is the one that pioneered it. The Nordstrom Personal Shopper was somebody who would have to curate something before you come in. You’re using digital technology to scale that. If you’re trying to do some commodity stuff, you really have no chance to compete. 

Mark Lavelle: Price arbitrage on commodities is not a good place to be in right now. We have Nestlé on our platform. They create whole products that are direct to consumer. We see B2B and manufacturers and consumer-packaged goods getting more aggressive and bullish in this area. The focus is back to your audience and the creation of products. The ability to source capital as your source demand is a huge change in how we used to do things.

Sramana Mitra: Is it in your product roadmap to do any integration with stuff like Kickstarter where a retailer who takes those orders will have to fulfill those orders as well. Is that part of the Kickstarter platform? >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Mark Lavelle, CEO of Magento Commerce (Part 4)

Mark Lavelle: Amazon made availability and fulfillment part of the experience. You are assured that you will get the delivery at a certain date and time. It’s not just the product that’s unique. It’s actually an entire end-to-end experience. There are companies that are doing this.

On our platform, we’ve got Graze. Who would have thought you could reinvent snacking. It’s based out of the UK. It’s a huge business that has created a subscription model for snacking. We have a similar company called Birch Box that has a subscription model. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Mark Lavelle, CEO of Magento Commerce (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How does your audience compete, especially on the logistics end of the spectrum where Amazon is just delivering unbelievable levels of service?

Mark Lavelle: The A-word is a big deal. Amazon has changed forever what consumer expectation is in terms of getting a product.

Sramana Mitra: Totally. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Mark Lavelle, CEO of Magento Commerce (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Clearly, there has been a massive explosion of niche e-commerce. Platforms like Magento as well as a few others that we have covered extensively have played a big role in enabling these companies and built very substantial e-commerce companies. One of my observations is that the bar is going up in terms of the user experience of e-commerce. When we started, it was just being able to buy from a website. Now people are differentiating with a lot more personalization, recommendation, and user experience that is vastly more complex to deliver from a platform point of view. That’s one the trends that I see. How do you see where we are today and what the needs of the market are? >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Mark Lavelle, CEO of Magento Commerce (Part 1)

This is a comprehensive discussion on the current state of the union in e-commerce with the CEO of one of the most popular platforms on which thousands of e-commerce sites are built. The outlook is somewhat scary with Amazon dominating at an alarming scale. But democratization is also on the horizon. Very interesting conversation, and a must-read for everyone who is involved in the e-commerce space.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing yourself as well as Magento.

Mark Lavelle: I’m the CEO of Magento Commerce. We are the largest global platform for digital commerce in the world. We recently spun out of eBay when eBay and PayPal split up about a year ago. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Blue Acorn CEO Kevin Eichelberger (Part 5)

Kevin Eichelberger: If I were looking to create a company or a startup that is going to solve the problems of tomorrow and not just the problems of today, I would look at the way consumers shop and the prediction around how they’re going to shop as the foundation for that. I think that introduces a lot of areas and opportunities and new innovative ideas for entrepreneurship because the way our systems, processes, and teams are designed organizationally are quite antiquated when you think about how people shop in the future.

I’ll break it down this way. Today, people engage in, what I refer to as, destination shopping. They go somewhere with the purpose of buying something. They go to a website. They call a phone number. They drive to a store. They do those things with the intention of buying something. They typically buy multiple things in one setting. They will concentrate their shopping activities when they do these destination events. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Blue Acorn CEO Kevin Eichelberger (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like this is also a key open problem around which more innovative solutions are in order and where innovators and entrepreneurs could come up with more innovative solutions.

Kevin Eichelberger: Absolutely. Mobile payments issue is a big opportunity. Mobile user experience is a big opportunity. I think there is a larger underlying shift in retail that will open up even greater opportunities for new ideas, new solutions, and new entrants in the marketplace in terms of a better way to engage with customers. That’s certainly something I could speak further about during the course of the conversation.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s turn it around into something very specific. If you were starting a company today focused on this problem, what kinds of things are in your mind about ways to solve the problem besides the mobile wallet issue? Are there other things that you can do that would be interesting?

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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Blue Acorn CEO Kevin Eichelberger (Part 3)

Kevin Eichelberger: Typically, we’d advise our clients about opportunities to improve the mobile and shopping experience, in particular, the checkout experience. There are two events that happened in 2016 that will create lots of opportunities for brands and retailers to make that process more seamless to an end user. By and large, that will be the opening of Android Pay and Apple Pay for mobile payment methods. Those systems used to only be available if you had a native mobile app. Most people shopping on a mobile device are shopping through mobile web. >>>