Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Suchit Bachalli, CEO of Unilog (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: As your primary playing ground, right?

Suchit Bachalli: Right. One of our earlier adopters Mayer Electric are based out of Birmingham, Alabama. I think they’re $800 million in revenue. They just had a regular website. There was no commerce and no way to buy anything online. Today, they have the full commerce solution. They have a native mobile app. Interestingly, one of the things they do is tool crib management on site. They use our application. Boeing would just use our mobile app to scan your PC codes and do fulfillment purchasing. Refreshments would be ordered through the mobile app.

That market is extremely fragmented and ignored. A lot of the times, we get into deals where a Hybris–Endeca wouldn’t give them time of day. First of all, it’s a million dollars to talk to them. Our distribution companies are largely family-owned. They run on really wafer thin margins. They don’t have that kind of checkbook. That conversation doesn’t really work very well. They’re limited to Magento. The transactions are complex in the B2B market. The customer is not going to come online and just swipe a card for $65,000.

Sramana Mitra: There are P.O.s and wholesale orders involved.

Suchit Bachalli: His customer needs, what is known as, a round trip punch out. He needs procurement and credit limits. Our platform can provide all of that visibility while the Magento platform cannot. They end up going with a lower end system like a Shopify or Magento but it is only for the B2C variants. For the odd walk-in customer that comes in and buys something, it’s good. But for the bulk of their business, they don’t have a solution because there’s no way that they can invest in a high-end system and the low-end system cannot really provide that value for them.

Sramana Mitra: What you described is an excellent positioning. How much do you charge when somebody is thinking about getting their system online? What are they looking at in terms of contract size?

Suchit Bachalli: It’s usually about $300,000.

Sramana Mitra: Let me now take you out of your own company and ask you a question. I have seen a few other players in this space. EDL is one that you may have seen. They’re a B2B e-commerce system on top of the Salesforce.com platform. Have you run into them?

Suchit Bachalli: I have not actually.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Suchit Bachalli, CEO of Unilog
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