Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Jason Wallis, CTO of Mozu (Part 1)

Mozu is a line of business within Volusion, one of the key small business e-commerce platforms that we have covered extensively in the past. Mozu caters to mid-market retailers. Jason discusses the trends he is seeing in that space.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to Mozu and yourself for some context.

Jason Wallis: Mozu is a modern commerce platform that has entered the market a couple of years ago. We’re a cloud platform designed to streamline and simplify the process of retailers adequately serving commerce needs that their consumers expect. We’re the first platform to be built since the mobile revolution was brought on by modern smartphone platforms. I’m the CTO of Mozu. I have been with Mozu since its inception and since we started on this journey to bring this platform to retailers.

Sramana Mitra: Could you talk about what kind of customers you serve? Is there a segmentation in the customer base that you like to work with?

Jason Wallis: We don’t really have a  particular vertical niche that we’re pigeonholed into. Partially that’s because of the opportunity space that we see across mid-market enterprise retailers that are struggling today with the legacy platforms to meet the demands of a highly mobile-enabled, omni-channel, and very savvy consumer base. We really attracted retailers from across a spectrum. Folks like Jelly Belly Candy Company is one that people would know. Bluefly is another one. We have sporting goods with multiple sporting goods retailers. It’s a cross-section of B2C and B2B customers.

Sramana Mitra: Pick customers that are representative of different styles of use cases. Let’s do a few use cases if you think that might be helpful to explain how you bring value to your customers.

Jason Wallis: We can start with the Jelly Belly use case. Jelly Belly came on to the Mozu platform a little over a year ago. They really had two primary challenges. One was they needed to deliver a better mobile-optimized experience to their customers. The second was they really operate in a lot of different markets and different customers. They have a direct to consumer business. They have a B2B business. They have specialty candy business and then they have global businesses everywhere.

Their challenge was, without increasing operational expenses, how can they effectively serve all those markets, and they chose Mozu as the key enabler for that. After going live after their primary B2C experience on Mozu, they started working independently on their own and were able to roll out 40 different websites in less than 12 months without having to scale their existing team. What’s difficult for retailers today is being able to operationalize and run a mobile-optimized site without crushing it under the load of having a lot of expenses and people overhead. That’s where Mozu stood out.

One little point is, just by switching to a mobile-optimized platform, their mobile sales increased 300% when they went live. The old story of consumers going to one of their sites on their mobile device and having a horrible experience that they couldn’t actually purchase was no longer the case anymore.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Jason Wallis, CTO of Mozu
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