Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Uppler CEO Grégoire Chauvin (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Put in perspective what’s happening in the set of companies like Shopify and BigCommerce that enable individual e-commerce sites. They seem to be doing very well, which means their merchants are doing well.

Grégoire Chauvin: Every brand needs to have its own website. It’s a must have. Maybe you will spend less marketing effort on that, but you still have this need to have your own e-commerce website. They manage to slash the prices. It’s incredible what they have done.

The thing is the main technological trend that we see here is that we are going from best-of-breed to all-in-one solution. Best-of-breed is creating an e-commerce platform or website where you have different solutions that can be connected to each other.

You have a product information management system that you connect to your own hosting platform, your own database, or your own search technology. It used to be very expensive to have a good quality website with the best-of-breed model because you need an integrator to connect all those platforms.

Shopify managed to give sometimes almost the same quality of result with just one all-in-one solution covering 80% of the needs covered with the best-of-breed solution. For the remaining 20%, you just have an API that you can use in order to integrate more advanced systems. They really managed to commoditize having an e-commerce website.

Sramana Mitra: You’re saying no matter what, you still need to have a direct website for your brand. Because Shopify is on a subscription fee model and the merchants are doing most of their business through the marketplaces, they still need to maintain a fully functional Shopify website.

Grégoire Chauvin: You don’t have the choice. Your own e-commerce website is for your captive audience. The people who would type the name of your brand in Google, they need to go directly to your website. You do not have to pay marketplace commission on those users. This is your captive audience.

Then you need a platform to acquire online users. What I don’t recommend is to try to acquire a lot of users on your Shopify website unless you have a very sophisticated strategy, good web marketing skills, and a lot of budget for that.

The winning solution if you’re not a fully web-based brand is to have your website for your own audience and platforms for customer acquisition.

Sramana Mitra: What do you see as open problems in the e-commerce space that warrants a new entrepreneur to start a company?

Grégoire Chauvin: I’m more focused on the B2B side so I can speak about that. In B2B, most of the purchases by the company will be for products that they need to have. On the other hand in B2C, it’s more of a product that you want or would be nice to have.

In B2B, when you run a restaurant, you need food supply. The main white space there is about the predictability of the needs. As in B2B, 99% of the transactions are must-have needs that are predictable.

I think there’s a huge space for some kind of AI tools that can connect all the past data of your activity and external data such as the weather in order to predict what you need to buy every month or every day. This is quite complicated to do, but if you manage to do that, you are able to access a market that is huge.

We should be able to predict 99% of what that market is purchasing. As a restaurant, I would like to have an interface showing me that today, you will need to buy 10 kilograms of rice. It should be as simple as that.

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