Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brian Dhatt, CTO of Borderfree (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Is there any other point that you want to make? Are there any open problems that you are seeing, trying to solve, or want to see entrepreneurs solve?

Brian Dhatt: The other big one that is worth discussing might be mobile, which I know you’re probably hearing a lot about. The funny thing is, outside of the United States, you see a completely different world of mobile. We’re seeing folks transacting inside of chatting applications like WeChat. This is something that hasn’t come to the United States yet. We typically are going direct to merchant websites. You’re not transacting outside those experiences. Moving towards a community-based, content-driven model for commerce is happening aggressively outside the United States.

We think there’s a lot of work to be done there to come up with the right model to penetrate those markets. It’s not something that, as US retailers, you’re ready to understand how your brand would survive outside your core site experience. We’re trying to help drive that conversation. I think that trend will come here to the United States. The WeChat experience, as an example, is extremely engaging because you’re shopping with friends. You’re talking about the items with friends and then you can transact without ever leaving the application. I won’t be surprised when we start to see that show up here. I think there’s a big opportunity to do more there.

All around, we’ve seen the news about Anthem BlueCross or Home Depot. Security is something we spend more and more time on. I think there are still a lot of open avenues for using a data-driven approach to understanding non-traditional attacks. You used to get a virus scanner or a malware scanner. But the types of attacks that we’re seeing out there in the industry tend to be social engineering-based. They tend to do APT type of threats. There’s much work still to be done on the ability to detect and counteract those. We invest a lot of time in security but we’re always interested in talking to upstarts in that industry.

I know you had mentioned you’re talking to quite a bit of folks who are on the marketing enablement side. We believe there’s much more to do there. When it comes to email, we still continue to see absolutely wonderful and great conversion. Typically, we don’t see a lot of email products, which are well integrated into a single view of customer that retailers and we like to see.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brian Dhatt, CTO of Borderfree
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