Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Bolt CEO Justin Grooms (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Right. What else do you want to share with me?

Justin Grooms: I just want to share how excited I am for where I think commerce is going around identity. So much has changed in e-commerce over the last decade, but one of the things that hasn’t changed too much, unfortunately, is curated, specialized shopping experiences.

If you or me each logged into our Amazon account and went to the homepage, we would have almost potentially unrecognizably different interests and things presented to us based on our long shopping history with Amazon. Amazon is frankly one of the only folks out there who’ve done a really great job in the United States of providing a curated buying experience. There’re some other emerging players that are pretty strong.

I think that that’s a big part of the future for retailers.

Sramana Mitra: So you want to use your data on customer identity to offer personalization capabilities to retailers?

Justin Grooms: We’re working with retailers on this right now. I want to be able to say that if a shopper wants to opt into sharing their information with a retailer, we can feed core information about that shopper that they’ve provided to the Bolt network over time, organically and seamlessly. This can enable that retailer to present a curated, relevant experience that presents useful information to that shopper with the intent of building a long-term relationship. Then, when they’re ready to buy, we can flow them through a quick and painless experience where the customer leaves feeling delighted and associates that delight with the retailer’s brand that they just went to.

Sramana Mitra: Have you tested this?

Justin Grooms: We are testing this right now with some of our bigger partners, and I think you’ll see some stuff come out this summer. It’s a really hard thing to do.

Sramana Mitra: Well, are consumers willing to let you do this?

Justin Grooms: Consumers, on average, we see a significant opt-in rate to share information with retailers. We find that if you are overt about the fact that you’re sharing your profile with a retailer and linking those accounts together, consumers are okay with that. Then, better yet, there’s no creep-out factor later of, how did you know that about me?

It’s, “Oh, I remember getting the interstitial pop-up. I gave permission to share my information with Revolve. Now I understand how Revolve knows all of this about me and is presenting me with things that are relevant for me as a buyer, which might be different than what’s relevant to you.”

Or even more impressively, I think, is how we’re able to create curated experiences, even in the same household, whereas what I look at and what my wife looks at might be different, and our experience on Revolve would be different because Revolve knows who each of us are.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. It’s actually an interesting positioning problem here.

Justin Grooms: What is interesting to us is the conversations. We don’t quite fit competitively in with what other people are doing. So you asked earlier who are our key competitors, and right now we just don’t have major overlap with anyone that’s trying to do what we’re doing right now.

Will we in the future? I’m sure. I think it’s the way to go. Obviously, I believe in this business model, and that’s why we’re pushing it. Will other people follow? I’m sure there’ll be some innovators that come into the space and try to. I hope that there are. That makes us perform better. What we’re seeing with a lot of legacy players is, they built their business around reselling payment processing to people, or they built their business around selling information between retailers.

They either need to massively change who they are identity-wise or convince retailers that the retailers should be paying more, and it’s okay to share marketing information between competitors.

I want to sell that.

Sramana Mitra: Very good. Good. Very interesting conversation. Thank you.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Bolt CEO Justin Grooms
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