Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Rick Wilson, President of Miva Merchant (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: E-commerce has been a category where a lot of people have bootstrapped businesses to some scale. You talked about your sweet spot being this half a million to million range. A large portion of that is probably bootstrapped businesses right?

Rick Wilson: Absolutely, I would say the vast majority.

Sramana Mitra: What are you hearing from this community? Are these people trying to scale? What is the thought process in your community?

Rick Wilson: I wonder about this sometimes. I wonder how unique our community is or if they are representative of the whole. For our community, venture capital is not a common pursuit. There’s a specific vein of customer who starts on something like a Kickstater or GoFundMe and they end up on Shopify specifically. They seem to have that market dialed-in. Those products like pebble watch or something, they end up going after venture capital. There are certainly a path there for a subset of merchants.

In our world, we see it a little differently. What you see is what I would call the more traditional small businesses where, universally, the goal for anyone who’s under a million is to get to that magic million number. They’re mostly building, for the lack of a better term, lifestyle companies. They’re building companies that support themselves and their family. They provide what used to be known as the American Dream on some level. There’s freedom and there’s some success. The other thing that we see in our space is a lot of business to business customers that were a version of that. Imagine in the 90s or 80s a brick-and-mortar business that sold custom carburetors. They did all of it via sales rep and telephone. In the 2000s, they might have put up a catalog so you can look at it. They never actually converted their business to being what I would call a digital business, which is at the end of the day what e-commerce is.

The difference between a non-e-commerce and e-commerce business is you have all your data digitized, you have products described, you have photos. All of the things that, in an analog world, you didn’t have to do ahead of time. We see a lot of business to business companies whose primary businesses is their traditional trade route. They’re looking to automate and add to their process and simplify and streamline.

Sramana Mitra: Any other thoughts on what you’re seeing? Upstream what do you think will happen in the next six years? By the end of the decade, what are some major changes that we anticipate?

Rick Wilson: I think e-commerce platforms are uniquely positioned to be the hub of your business. Most of that is because of it being tied to your revenue. Right now for the most part, you have an e-commerce business and you have a MailChimp account, and you may have a CRM somewhere. I think you’ll see a convergence of those processes where someone logs into their e-commerce product which really becomes just a commerce product. It’s everything from their mobile point of sale which you’re already seeing with Square and to some extent, Shopify, and all of that from a multi-channel world running from your e-commerce platform. Things that Amazon was barely doing five to six years ago will be in the domain of everybody in the next five to six years.

Sramana Mitra: Is that in your product road map?

Rick Wilson: That is definitely where we think we’re headed.

Sramana Mitra: Great! Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Rick Wilson, President of Miva Merchant
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