Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Darren Hill, CEO of WebLinc (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I see it.

Darren Hill: It’s quite powerful. People share them like crazy. Our site allows hearting and comments and the customer base is very active.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. When you put something up on the website, I’m sure you are seeing huge amounts of social media sharing.

Darren Hill: Absolutely. That is the key. That was almost a by-product of allowing people to upload their information. The big value was that these girls are excited that they’re on the Free People site.

Sramana Mitra: The user-generated content is curated and then your catalog allows the site owners to curate which pictures are going to be featured.

Darren Hill: Yes. They have to moderate a little bit just in case you get some weirdo wanting to upload some strange photo. They definitely moderate it and pick the ones that they like the most.

Sramana Mitra: That’s a very interesting use case. Give us a few more use cases. I’m happy to continue in the fashion story. I think that’s got a lot of interesting feature requirements. What other personalization and nuances does your system empower?

Darren Hill: We can stay with Free People for mobile. They have over a hundred stores where they have all the products they can fit in the store. A lot of times, you’re going to miss a product, some sizes, or some colors. One of the tools that we built for their customer is that the customer can have the app, go into a Free People store, and easily scan the barcode of any product. They’ll see every single size and color that’s available for that product from the web inventory. If they add it to cart while they’re in the store, we’re going to give them shipping. Furthermore, that shopper can see other products that are available in the store that go well with that product so they can get that cross-sell and up-sell that we do pretty well online. That’s been very powerful. It has increased their online sales by almost 10% immediately after we launched that mobile app. They do a significant amount of revenue online.

Sramana Mitra: Let me see if I got this. Your master catalog is tagged with which store and at what inventory. When a customer walks in, you’re basically asking them to look up the mobile app to see what’s in the store that is their size and their style. It’s almost a personalized version of the physical store, but you’re showing what is available in the physical store in the app.

Darren Hill: We can show them that in the app, but we can also show them anything that might not be available. If they would like to buy it, they can purchase it through the phone app and get free shipping. We do both. We can show them things that are available in that store that they might be missing. The flip side is we can still have an opportunity to sell to the customer the stuff that is not available in the physical inventory.

Sramana Mitra: When you’re actually looking at how the transaction flows, what do you see? If something is available at the store, people are buying it at the store. If something is not available, they’re ordering online while at the store. Is that what’s happening?

Darren Hill: Yes, that’s what’s happening through the app. The app also allows the girls to take photos of themselves and upload it to the appropriate product. We’ve also integrated all these omni-channel features so that while the girls are shopping, we are able to give her much more data than she would get just by looking at the product.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Darren Hill, CEO of WebLinc
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