Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Gerrit Kolb, CEO of CoreMedia (Part 4)

Gerrit Kolb: You asked about the completeness of the e-commerce platform. How do you integrate and what is the mechanism? There are basically two ways you can integrate. It’s typically referred to as who owns the glass. Some vendors go in and they say, “We’ve got to control the glass because the experience is so important.” The shopping element of e-commerce is reduced to an API calling. You own the whole experience from an event content management and a web experience management platform. Then you’re doing the call-outs to the back end e-commerce system.

The other thing, which is actually something that is important is that whoever is big in this business, has probably been in business for more than two or three years. One of our customers is a company called Office Depot. They’re the fifth largest retailer in North America. They generate more than $7.2 billion in sales on their online platform. Because of the complexity of the procurement, supply chain management, and integration, it’s absolutely impossible to basically come and say, “We’ll do a big bang launch five years from now. We’ve implemented everything over the last 20 years.” It might be desirable from a technical perspective. But it’s become impossible to react in the time that the market gives you to survive.

The other option that you have to have is the ability to take experience from their side and augment that with the elements that will give you the SEO capabilities and allocate that to specific areas of the screen. Instead of reducing the functionality of the e-commerce system to API calls, you basically go in. You select varying, personalized, and contextualized areas of the screen to be allocated to specific elements that have been created as part of the content generation and syndication process.

You could ask, “Why is it that the e-commerce products don’t have that?” The reason is that it’s extremely complicated because it’s not just about generating a little picture or storing a video. That’s easy. But how do you actually align and contextualize the page based on context sources? How do you take into account what pages someone went to before they ended up with a specific experience? How do you factor in your CRM data – the segment of the campaigns that you’re rendering out? You might need to push a specific product because you want to make sure that it’s out before the next version of the product comes up. All these things need to be contextualized with the content. That’s hard and it’s something that we’ve been doing for 19 years now. This is not something you do on a Thursday afternoon.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Gerrit Kolb, CEO of CoreMedia
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