Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Uppler CEO Grégoire Chauvin (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Are your clients mostly in France or are they elsewhere as well?

Grégoire Chauvin: Half of our clients would be in the US and half in Western Europe. 

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk a bit about where you’re seeing adoption? What industry by geography? Is the food and beverage trend global or specific to a particular geography?

Grégoire Chauvin: It is global. We have similar projects in the US. The market has a lot of intermediaries and big distributors. Many companies are trying to disrupt that.

Also in the automotive industry. When you want to buy spare parts at a garage, you will go to your local distributor. It’s possible that you may have more transparent prices if you have a marketplace where you can buy those.

Medical supply is also a big one where a lot of players are trying to create platforms for people to have more transparent access to the catalogs of the suppliers. On the other hand, we see some niche markets emerging all of a sudden. For instance, the cannabis market has been booming in recent years. The hemp market is also a big trend, a lot of people like to buy cbd oil tinctures too, what is also a good option is the best Delta 8 gummies.

Each time there is new product available, especially in the US market, a lot of players are trying to create the appropriate platform to service this market.

Sramana Mitra: In this series, we often ask for trends. What other trends can you talk about based on your work? 

Grégoire Chauvin: In e-commerce in general, there are two main trends. The first one is platforms and marketplaces. As you may know, Amazon represents half of the total ec-ommerce market in the US.

Today, if you are a fashion brand, it’s not relevant at all to spend money acquiring customers for your own website because there are platforms doing it for you now.

The challenge as a brand or a supplier is not to create your own e-commerce platform, but you should spend most of your effort in how to connect your product to the different platforms in order to have a global reach. It’s more of a technology challenge. This is the first big trend.

The second one is B2B ecommerce. For many years, all the innovations in e-commerce concern B2C. In B2B, there’s Alibaba for Chinese products. B2B is much harder to create in terms of e-commerce platforms. Buyers will have different prices depending on geography and size. Some products will be confidential.

You will have not only direct orders but also requests for quotation or requests for proposals. For all of those reasons, there have been few innovations. Now that B2B platforms are available, there is a big demand there.

Sramana Mitra: Let me go back to the first trend that you brought up. I assume you’re talking about the a B2C trend of people needing to plug into the marketplaces and away from direct customer acquisition. 

Grégoire Chauvin: We see that in both B2B and B2C. In B2C, it tends to be almost Amazon only or a few players. The difference in B2B is that you want to target the vertical-specific platforms. 

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Uppler CEO Grégoire Chauvin
1 2 3 4