Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Darren Hill, CEO of WebLinc (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How do you do the recommendation on what goes with what? Is that a manual recommendation system or is there technology that enables scaling of something like that?

Darren Hill: It’s a mix. There are several data points that go into it such as what people have bought and what they have looked at. That’s the easy one and something that everybody’s been doing for years. The shoppers can put products together in their own category. They’re being a stylist, if you will, on the site. We use that data as well. We are able to see which customer is the best stylist based on how much sales is generated through what they’re suggesting. Then we have professional stylists who work there. They’re also putting this information in. We essentially take those data points and make the suggestion based on all of that.

Sramana Mitra: How long has Free People been your client?

Darren Hill: Since they’ve sold product number one, which was around 2004.

Sramana Mitra: They launched their site on your system?

Darren Hill: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of revenue does Free People do?

Darren Hill: I don’t know if they’re public with their revenues. I think it’s well over $100 million.

Sramana Mitra: What percentage of that is going through the website versus going through their store?

Darren Hill: 100% of that is web revenue. I don’t know what their store revenues are.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. They did have stores before they came to you to launch their e-commerce property?

Darren Hill: No, they didn’t. They were just a wholesale brand. They sold through two stores, but they didn’t have their own individual store. The first product they sold to a consumer we did through the web. That was pretty successful. Their next stage was to open up stores and start catalogs. That has been a common path for our online-only clients. Introducing a catalog is quite common and they use that catalog to spur online numbers.

Sramana Mitra: I was thinking more about the physical store aspect of it. Is it a physical store becoming an online store or is it an online store expanding with a physical footprint. A lot of the functionality that you’re providing are functionalities that we were looking at way back in 1999. Of course, nothing really came up on our radar at that time in terms of doing that level of deep personalization. It’s good to see that that has advanced significantly now. Do you want to talk about any of your other clients? Free People was a very interesting discussion.

Darren Hill: Outside of personalization, some of the problems that we solve are scalability issues. A lot of our clients start out doing $5 to $10 million and their goal is to do $100 million. That’s difficult. But our system enables the clients to be able to get huge traffic spikes and still be stable. We have a client called Nasty Gal. She was doing online sales of about $3 million and within 18 months, she was doing $150 million on her system. That’s raw scalability. That was a big one.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Darren Hill, CEO of WebLinc
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