Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Eugene Laney, Head of International Trade Affairs at DHL Express (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Any other trend that you want to discuss?

Eugene Laney: I just want to point out a study where we looked at the trends in global e-commerce. Some of the more interesting trends pointed to the importance of finding a market. We noticed that a lot of the goods that are sold out of the US go to Germany and UK. We also saw what the demand for products in different countries was like. In places like China, they depend more on the reviews of products whereas in Germany and UK, they just do searches on the product price. I’ll definitely invite you to take a look at the Shop The World study because there are some very interesting trends that you can see within the e-commerce environment.

Sramana Mitra: Let me give you the context of why I chose to probe based on what you told me. I chose to probe the zero logistics e-commerce perspective because I think it’s incredibly important. Let’s look at American for instance. There is a huge population of unemployed people right now. There’s a middle-class that is hurting. Just being able to run your own small e-commerce business with an international clientele and being able to use these third-party fulfillment vendors, warehouse, and logistics vendors like yourself makes it viable for a lot of these people to have a livelihood. It’s a very important trend that I think needs to be nurtured.

Eugene Laney: Exactly. That’s one of the reasons why we’ve invested heavily in our partnership with the Department of Commerce. We want to identify those small to medium sized businesses so that we can help them reach the 220 countries we’re involved in. More importantly, we want to educate them on the trends in m-commerce. The whole idea of using mobile devices. Since we have such a strong market presence there and there’s a number of mobile devices and a young population but there’s no broadband, we see potentially a huge market right there. Once we’re able to work with the Department of Commerce and companies like Google or Facebook, we can figure out ways to get that sort of technology out there so that we could then allow a lot of those small to medium sized businesses to sell their goods back into the US and, to your point, improve the economic development along the way.

Sramana Mitra: Terrific. Thanks for taking the time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Eugene Laney, Head of International Trade Affairs at DHL Express
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