Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Bob Dufour, President of Fusion (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of trends, is there anything else that you want to share?

Bob Dufour: I think for me, it’s digitalization driving price transparency accelerated by these aggregators, and the importance of having ancillary strategy.

Sramana Mitra: What are some of the open opportunities in the general space that you would encourage entrepreneurs who are starting out to look at?

Bob Dufour: There’s a corollary to this. Think iTunes. So many of these ancillary products that people are trying to sell are analog products that they’re trying to digitize and sell in a digital environment. Our experience is that there’s this huge need for a lot of micro products. You don’t need to maybe sell this highly bundled ancillary product. Maybe, there’s just a component of it. Let me take an example of a travel insurance product that we’re familiar with. Maybe you don’t need to sell this bundled product. Maybe what somebody wants is just protection for their luggage. There are 27-year-old kids. Nothing bad is going to happen. They don’t need to worry about anything. They’re just worried about their brand new piece of luggage.

In order for products to work, they need to be inexpensive. Inexpensive would be less than 8% to 10% of the price of the core product they’re attached to. They need to be very simple to explain. We commonly see that we have to be able to explain the product in 200 characters. If you can’t explain a product that quickly, it’s just not going to sell. It cannot have a whole lot of restrictions because if somebody clicks on a drop-down and they see 40 pages of terms and conditions, they’re going to get scared. You need to have products that work in this environment. Having someone who’s thinking about the digital sale of these ancillary products and thinking, “I need to have something inexpensive, easy to explain, and something that can be fulfilled quickly and easily.” There’s a big opportunity there.

The corollary to that is there are many product suppliers out there that would like nothing better than to be able to engage in the digital environment but they’re not digitally savvy. A great example is insurance companies. They may have a good product, but they think they have to ask for 60 questions. That will just never work. They have to get comfortable with two or three questions. I need to be able to accept an electronic purchase order. Some of them are still dealing with Excel spreadsheets. If you’re a high-volume retailer and you need to connect with someone and they don’t really understand APIs and mobile delivery, they’re just not going to get it off the ground. I see a lot of companies who really need to figure out how to digitally enable and connect themselves to all the various distributors out there.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Bob Dufour, President of Fusion
1 2 3 4 5 6 7