Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Gerrit Kolb, CEO of CoreMedia (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: You should look at WebLinc. WebLinc is a very comprehensive system with one of the best personalization capabilities on the commerce side. They’re not necessarily as focused on the content side, although they are doing some very interesting user-generated content work.

Let’s talk about open problems and opportunities out there. Based on this conversation and the WebLinc conversation that we had a few weeks ago, one of the opportunities that comes to my mind is an integrated next-generation e-commerce system that really is set-up to power a Web 3.0 user experience which fuses content, community, commerce, vertical search, and personalization but can be handled from one system. Isn’t that an accurate observation?

Gerrit Kolb: I think that’s a very accurate observation. If you look into the infrastructure of the brick-and-mortar stores, it’s still heterogeneous, and it’s so grown. Their campaign management is fragmented. For a pure web player, you’re spot on. This is something that will happen. The one thing that I think is more realistic and what I think holds more promise is the integrated offering on the other side because when you look at everything that has been done, you hear a lot about Big Data and analytics. The one thing that hasn’t happened, and I think this is the biggest next opportunity that is out there, is if you’re going through the processes of e-commerce vendors and if you go through the processes of how they optimize their website, they’re getting answers from Google Analytics or Omniture on anything that’s related to their website. All this is totally useless to them. What really matters is the conversion. The larger e-commerce vendors just take 2% of their shop abandonment numbers and they’re making big money, but there’s no analytics out there that actually gives them the full view no matter how much people are promising this. I think technically this is very feasible.

This goes to the next step, which I think is an even bigger opportunity. When you understand what the metrics are from the click to the actual purchase, you’re looking at a multi-dimensional problem because you’re looking at so many steps that have so many elements to influence them. They’re trying to optimize them. It’s hard enough. If you try to optimize it for multiple pockets like age brackets, regions, or specific contexts, it’s simply impossible to do. The only way you could potentially hit this is the ability to create a feedback loop and basically do what you do on Excel, and feed that back as a context source to a delivery engine. Basically, you do automated variations on the delivery of the context side and on specific brackets, if you wish. If you have that, you have a machine to print money. I think it’s feasible. It doesn’t deal with all the legacy issues that you have. If you have this, the traditional brick-and-mortar stores are going to be in big trouble.

Sramana Mitra: What is the size of your company currently?

Gerrit Kolb: We’re about 150 people.

Sramana Mitra: What about revenue?

Gerrit Kolb: We’re north of $20 million.

Sramana Mitra: Great! Thank you for talking. It was interesting and stimulating to learn about what you’re doing. I’m very aware of the issues. I’m glad to see what you’re doing is tying into e-commerce and moving this Web 3.0 user experience forward.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Gerrit Kolb, CEO of CoreMedia
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