Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brian Dhatt, CTO of Borderfree (Part 3)

Brian Dhatt: From a personalization perspective, you can go down to the complex individualized personalization. In the first stage, a lot of times, we can do a lot of personalization as part of the site experience based on things like different seasons globally. For example, in Australia you might be looking for a bikini whereas in New York, you don’t have any desire to do that. We actually think that will play a big role for global merchants.

Sramana Mitra: WebLink has a lot of customers in the apparel space. Personalization based on size is one of the big drivers of lift in terms of financial metrics.

Brian Dhatt: Absolutely. You can only imagine that in the global space, it gets more complex.

Sramana Mitra: Size is very complex because fashion designers do not follow the same size.

Brian Dhatt: One wishes that there is consistency there. I know a lot of folks going after the sizing space. We talk to them because that’s a big issue globally. We’re still rooting for somebody to come out as a winner there because I think it’s a space where if somebody can get it right, we’ll see a lot more sales.

Sramana Mitra; Talk about the international angle. What are your key observations? What are the key trends there?

Brian Dhatt: They’re not entirely different from what we see here but they have different flavors. I think removing friction from transactions is a big deal internationally. In the United States, we’re seeing things like Apple Pay. The first time you use Apple Pay or Google Wallet, you say, “That was so much easier.” Then you start to prefer to transact that way. We see the same things happening globally.

That means different things in each country. In the payment space, there is not one payment type we could implement around the world and just make transactions easier. When we go to China, we have China UnionPay. When we go over to the Nordic countries, we look at something like Klarna.

Removing the kind of uncertainty and friction from the transaction is even more important in the global scale. That’s why we try to put questions like customs, duties, and taxes out of the equation so that your transaction, even if you’re sitting in the UK or US, would feel exactly the same. Item shows up. You don’t get a bill from customs three weeks later saying, “By the way, we added duties on your product.” We take care of all of that. We’ve observed that a lot of folks hesitate when it comes to cross-border commerce because they don’t have confidence that they’re actually going to receive the goods.

Another area of friction is local carriers. Instead of saying, “This item will come via post.”, if you are in Saudi Arabia, we can ship to you via a carrier you know and trust versus a US international carrier. We want to make the transactions just as easy as you’re shopping locally.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brian Dhatt, CTO of Borderfree
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