Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brian Dhatt, CTO of Borderfree (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Because you’re at Borderfree, your angle is on the international. We will explore that angle, but I just want to anchor this discussion by pointing out a few other things that I see in e-commerce. We started covering these quite extensively actually. Very recently, we have covered two companies that are each furthering the evolution of high-end e-commerce systems—0ne from the dimension of personalization and another from the dimension of content-driven commerce. Both are massive trends.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with this piece that I wrote in 2007 defining what I see as the formula for Web 3.0. The formula was Web 3.0 = 4C + P + VS. The four Cs are defined as context, community, commerce, and content. P is personalization and VS for vertical search. Now eight years later, we are starting to see systems that address not all of it but parts of it. WebLink for instance is a company that we spoke with recently in this series that highlighted heavily the evolution of the personalization-driven commerce. They’re also doing interesting things in their system with user-generated content as part of that.

Then, we’ve also looked at a German company called CoreMedia where the content-driven commerce phenomenon is discussed very extensively. There, themes like impact of content on search engine optimization and harnessing organic web traffic as well as influencing decisions of customers both online and offline using content is a massive trend right now. These are issues that we’ve tackled. In today’s conversation with you, we’re going to tackle the cross-border and internationalization aspect of the evolution of e-commerce.

Brian Dhatt: Interestingly enough, when you mentioned personalization and content-driven, it actually is very important to us and our merchant partners as well. An example is, there’s a show in South Korea. The name translates to My Love from The Star. If you recall Gossip Girl a few years ago at its height, it was driving enormous volume in terms of the fashion that the characters wore. That same concept translates over to what we look at and what we do. There is a demand that’s driven from trends like that, which on the cross-border side are a little more opaque.

SEO is a lot more difficult to manage if you’re working with a foreign language. That’s part of where we’re seeing these trends coming into the system and then helping advise our merchants on how they can actually capture that demand. That was similar back in my Sugar days. We actually spent a lot of time understanding the merger of content and commerce. We had the content arm at Pop Sugar as well as the commerce arm. We’re big believers of that as well.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brian Dhatt, CTO of Borderfree
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