Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: James Green, CEO of Magnetic (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What size are we talking in revenue terms?

James Green: The sweet spot for us is total online sales of $5 million to $100 million. There are a couple of people who are a bit bigger but mostly, they’re in that range.

Sramana Mitra: Switching gears, what are the emerging trends in e-commerce that you see as significant and what are the open problems in the context of those changes.

James Green: I already touched on these things when we talked about what we’re doing. They do revolve around privacy and your ability to coordinate the rise of point solutions. These are the biggest trends. There are other trends as well. A lot of the things are happening in the online merchant segment. The services that online merchants are buying themselves are beginning to conflict with the services they traditionally buy from advertising agencies.

Traditionally, a large company says, “I’m going to use an advertising agency to do my advertising but I am going to run my client communications myself.” Client communication means emails, newsletters, and things like that. Over time, that has also come to mean site retargeting because that’s so tightly coupled as we discussed earlier.

Once you’re doing site retargeting, you start saying, “Maybe I’ll work with someone like Magnetic and do advertising as well.” Suddenly, you’re in conflict with your agency who is also doing your advertising. One of the trends that we see with retailers is this mix of half the retailers leveraging their agencies more and the other half leveraging their agencies less. It’s unclear what will happen.

Some of the smaller and nimbler agencies are trying to become experts in these e-commerce systems so that they can control more of customer communication and more of the stack themselves. The larger agencies are still more focused on media. Some of that budget is being taken away from them with clients funding those media directly, which is interesting. We are agnostic to that problem. We are happy to work with a company either way.

Sramana Mitra: Great. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: James Green, CEO of Magnetic
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