Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Uppler CEO Grégoire Chauvin (Part 1)

Grégoire discusses two key trends in e-commerce: B2B and marketplaces.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to the company.

Grégoire Chauvin: I’m the Founder of Uppler. We are a software company. We develop software that lets you create your own B2B e-commerce platform. We have different use cases for that. What we create the most are B2B marketplaces.

Let’s say you want to create a platform to connect people to their vehicle’s suppliers. You can use our technology to create that kind of B2B platform in one specific industry. This is one use case.

Also, we create internal marketplaces for the procurement’s needs. When you’re a big organization, you need to have a lot of contacts and transactions with your own suppliers so that you can create your own internal marketplace and have all your suppliers on board and have all their products in one interface.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of customers are you seeing traction with?

Grégoire Chauvin: Creating a marketplace is a question that a lot of big companies are asking themselves. Most of the time, they have a lot of data that they can use. There are some specific cases that are relevant.

If today you have a trade show, it makes a lot of sense for you to create a digital extension of that trade show, which would be a B2B marketplace. There are many different use cases where it can be relevant to create a marketplace.

Another one, for instance, is if you are a brand selling your own product online, and you spend a lot of effort and money to acquire customers, you may want to sell complementary products from other brands on your own website. You may want to turn your website into your own marketplace in order to extend your catalog of complementary products.

Sramana Mitra: What industries are you seeing traction in?

Grégoire Chauvin: Food and beverage is a huge one. Today, it’s a very non-transparent system with a lot of intermediaries. If you open a restaurant, you’re going to be in contact with distributors, but it’s very hard to get in touch with the direct food suppliers or food wholesalers. We are helping a lot of companies who are trying to disrupt the food and beverage market.

One big use case that we are doing in France is, we have the largest physical B2B market in Europe. It’s called Rungis. Every day, all the restaurants from France come to that place in order to buy their daily supplies of food and beverage. We are creating an online platform for them to digitize those transactions.

Sramana Mitra: What is your business model?

Grégoire Chauvin: We are license-based. It means that our clients come to us. They explain to us what they want to do in terms of features and volume of transaction. From that, we create a quotation which is going to be a fixed cost for them. As long as they can support that fixed cost, they can grow as much as they want. 

Sramana Mitra: That’s a subscription fee?

Grégoire Chauvin: Yes, annual subscription. 

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Uppler CEO Grégoire Chauvin
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