Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Arish Ali, CEO of Skava (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How many retailers have you worked with in this journey so far?

Arish Ali: 25 to 30.

Sramana Mitra: These are large retailers?

Arish Ali: We, almost exclusively, focus on large retailers, because they have bigger budgets. We always made sure that we were making money from each of the contracts we signed.

Sramana Mitra: Was there any pattern in the retailers that you were catering to? Were there any particular segments of characteristics of the retailers that you have particular experience working with?

Arish Ali: We work with all types of retailers. The problems across all of them are exactly the same. They have an e-commerce platform and consumers want to buy stuff from that retailer. Unless they could give a great experience on these other devices, they would lose that revenue.

Sramana Mitra: That’s a very simplistic way of looking at the different segments of e-commerce. There are different segments that have different behaviors. Fashion e-commerce behaves very differently from selling diamonds online. That’s what I’m trying to get at. Where is your sweet spot?

Arish Ali: I would say companies that are in apparel and general merchandising. Companies like Staples or GAP. There are two paths to it. One is how you sell to the consumers. What kind of marketing do you do to attract the user? That is what is very different across these retailers. We are more focused on providing the horizontal e-commerce capabilities that apply to all of them.

If you look at other traditional e-commerce platforms, they are used by retailers of every stripe and shape because those are the fundamental capabilities that you need for e-commerce. Then you have to do a marketing layer on top of that. Our focus was more on those horizontal capabilities that work across different shades of e-commerce. This works regardless of what you are buying.

Most of those capabilities have to be rendered very fast in mobile devices. You have to build a very seamless checkout. That is actually the biggest problem in mobile. The checkout forms in traditional e-commerce sites were very painful to fill out on a mobile device. We actually won an award for simplifying one of our client’s checkout, which improved their conversion to almost 75%. Those innovations and improvements that we did apply to every vertical within the retail sector.

We have tried to stay as horizontal as possible. We want to give customers the tools that they can customize. They can sell diamonds differently from shoes. That’s a good point because many retailers with a traditional e-commerce platform are selling different types of products, but they’re using the same PDP page template to sell them. If you go to a shop, the shopkeeper wouldn’t sell you a dress and an electronics the same way. On an e-commerce platform, you have one PDP. The fact that our platform gave them the ability to sell different items differently is what they like. How do you sell? That is not where we build our expertise on.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Arish Ali, CEO of Skava
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