Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Darren Hill, CEO of WebLinc (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s fast forward to 2014. What is your business today?

Darren Hill: 2014 is an interesting transitional year for us. We had been in business for 20 years. All of the growth that we had, which was pretty significant, was organic. We invested all of our profits back into the business and never took any outside investment up until last year [2014]. Last year was the first time that we did take outside investments.

Sramana Mitra: What is your business?

Darren Hill: We have an e-commerce platform. Companies hire us to use that e-commerce platform for their business. It controls everything that their online store is doing. It controls the front-end—what the customers sees and what the customer interacts with.

Sramana Mitra: Help us understand how you fit in the ecosystem map. We’ve had many of the e-commerce platform vendors on this forum. How do you compare and contrast with them? What is your sweet spot? What is your positioning in the e-commerce platform marketplace?

Darren Hill: We go after the mid-market. Bigcommerce and Magento are the entry-level systems. They’re fantastic systems for somebody doing a few thousand to even a few million dollars a year online.

Sramana Mitra: Bigcommerce claims that their sweet spot is more in the million dollar plus area.

Darren Hill: That’s not true. For us, our average client is doing about $50 million online. We sign on clients who are doing $10 million to $15 million. Then, all the way up, we have clients who are doing several hundred millions of dollars.

Sramana Mitra: How many clients do you have?

Darren Hill: A little over a hundred clients. Last year, total revenue of companies running our software was well over $2 billion.

Sramana Mitra: What is your revenue?

Darren Hill: We don’t disclose revenue numbers.

Sramana Mitra: What trends do you see in the 100 clients that you have? What are the key trends that you are seeing vis-a-vis e-commerce?

Darren Hill: There’s a few. For our clients, a lot of them are in fashion retail. These are heavily branded sites that really fit in with their overall messaging but are still focusing the UX on the ease of use of shopping for their customers. That includes a lot of personalization—not just the on-site recommendations. They really have technologies in place where the home page that I see would be different form the homepage that you would see. The system, knowing that you came from a specific search engine or that you’ve been here before, is dynamic from every standpoint. That’s one of the biggest. That’s where we spend a lot of time working on.

Sramana Mitra: That’s of great interest to me personally. I’d like to learn more about how you deliver what you deliver. Let’s take two or three clients of yours and illustrate some of the unique things that you’re able to do with those clients.

Darren Hill: One of our clients is called Do It Best Corporation. They’re a hardware store chain. They basically have a lot of franchises around the world—around 3,400 individual stores. The system that we’re putting in place for them is allowing all of those franchises to have their own individual storefront. They all share a base catalog. Those stores are able to put in individual products of their own. You might have someone who’s in South Florida that would have some type of alligator deterrent fence. But for someone who’s selling products in Wisconsin, it wouldn’t make sense to have anything related to alligators. They are able to put in specific products that they want. Our system also understands the geography of where the customer is coming from. We’re able to tweak and change based on where that customer is coming from.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Darren Hill, CEO of WebLinc
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