Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Suchit Bachalli, CEO of Unilog (Part 2)

Suchit Bachalli: If you look at Grainger or Staples, they spend hundreds of millions of dollars in building that ecosystem. That ecosystem is built brick by brick, block by block with a wide variety of software products. Now, let’s look at the SMB space, say someone who has $600 million in revenue. They’re a B2B wholesale distribution company and the type of company you’ve never heard of because their idea of marketing is a barbecue Sunday. These are companies that have $600 million in revenue and 40 locations nationwide. They have city counters where you can buy anything from valves to gaskets to electrical wiring. They sell to other businesses.

They compete with Amazon, Grainger, and Home Depot because the small business that’s buying from them has the option to buy the entire product line online. The independent contractor who’s doing your renovation can go to Home Depot, open a contractor account, and go get Kohler. You don’t even have to go there. You can just go to the website and buy it. This mid-market segment is competing with Grainger and Grainger who have invested $300 million in this ecosystem. There’s no possible way that the mid-market firm can compete with Grainger in brick and mortar.

Our value proposition is that we’ll level the playing field online. We’ll give him the exact same ecosystem delivered as one single enterprise commerce solution. Our enterprise software application has PIM and MDM, which a founder of a PIM/MDM said, “By fit, form, and function, it does everything that any PIM can do.” It has its own search engine which the founder of Endeca said does everything that Endeca does. It has the card functionality. For a fraction of the cost, a mid-size distributor can now get a technology platform that helps him compete with Amazon Supply.

Sramana Mitra: When you say that, whom do you directly compete with? Where exactly do you position yourself in terms of your offering?

Suchit Bachalli: Great question. I shy away from competing with the River Strands in the PIM world. I shy away from the Sitecores, Joomlas, and WordPresses of the world. I shy away from Hybris, or ATG Oracle for the simple reason that it’s not a fair competition. They have a piece of software that does one thing and one thing only.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Suchit Bachalli, CEO of Unilog
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