Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Mark Lavelle, CEO of Magento Commerce (Part 6)

Mark Lavelle: The ability to launch and scale applications today is like electricity in your home. It’s getting cheaper and cheaper everyday. We’re entering an era where developers step back in and run these applications and create great experiences. This is a great era of software coming back. We have SaaS applications on the back end to do common things where we’re not differentiating.

An entrepreneur is going to win when they develop the next great digital experience that delivers their product in a great way in, say, Instagram. We have this company called Card that has done a great job with Magento integrating into Instagram. They sell hand-carved wooden iPad covers. They’re beautiful works of art. Their main channel had been Instagram. That’s an example of a great product expertly curated in a great channel where their customer was spending time. That’s exciting. I don’t understand Snapchat at all. What implications does that have for reaching the next customer.

Sramana Mitra: Where would you ask new entrepreneurs to look for opportunities?

Mark Lavelle: So much is happening. I’m fascinated by voice as the next engagement device. We spend so much time learning about what mobile conversion rates are. We’re very quickly entering a phase where I can just walk into my office and say, “We need more pens.” I can do it in my home.

Those areas of the consumer that uses sensors is the next frontier. I’d also say that this concept of virtual or augmented reality is real. We will be walking into stores where promotions will be curated in front of us. You see this happening in museums where we used to have those clunky little Sony players with the earplugs. Now anywhere we go, we just click on an app and it will tell us a story. Those types of personal assistants that are always on and knowing what you want is a great area for entrepreneurial development.

Sramana Mitra: I have been big on personalization for a long time. In 1999, I started a fashion e-commerce company where the whole premise was personalized stores. It was a bit too early. It was right in that dot-com meltdown so it didn’t work. We had an acquisition offer from Ralph Lauren. We didn’t sell and immediately after, the market crashed.

I’ve been thinking about this a long time. I still don’t see the level of personalization that I would like to see, especially in fashion. Part of it is, it’s very difficult. Technically, it’s difficult to do. Now AI is big. There are some platforms that have more personalization capabilities built in. I’ve talked to some of them.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Mark Lavelle, CEO of Magento Commerce
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