Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Solid Commerce CEO Eran Pick (Part 1)

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Solid Commerce sits in the middle of the multi-channel e-commerce ecosystem. Read on to learn more about the segment.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning and introduce Solid Commerce as well as your own background.

Eran Pick: I’m the CEO and founder of Solid Commerce. We help merchants and brands sell online on multiple marketplaces. This includes sales channels like eBay, Amazon, Walmart, Facebook, Google, and Instagram. We help merchants to sell in all those marketplaces at the same time.

We engage with the merchants and we help them with two things. One, we help them sell more by getting them to more marketplaces and sales channels. Second, we help them reduce their overhead and optimize their operations by consolidating the logistic operations across all those marketplaces. 

Sramana Mitra: What is the format of your value addition? Are you adding value through technology, consulting, or logistic services? What is the core value proposition of Solid Commerce? 

Eran Pick: We are a 100% software company. Sometimes we partner with logistics companies to reduce the friction in using their services. If you are using a 3PL, you’ll typically need a solution like ours to be the glue to make sure that your 3PL is talking to all your sales channels, order flow, and inventory flow. We’ll be the glue between those two systems. Our value is solving problems with technology.

Sramana Mitra: Let me ask you some ecosystem questions which I love to do when we do these thought leadership interviews. I love to probe the ecosystem map around a particular problem. We have merchants who use Shopify and then they also use marketplaces like eBay and Amazon.

Talk to us about the other key challenges in rationalizing these marketplaces. From the merchant’s point of view, what are the challenges of being in all of these channels?

Eran Pick: There are different challenges in different stages of the business. One of the benefits to marketplaces is the ability of the marketplace to get buyers to see you and your product and to get dollars quickly at your door.

Something harder to do is if you have a Shopify or a BigCommerce doing Google marketing and social marketing. It depends on where you are coming from and what your strengths are. The benefit in marketplaces is typically faster time-to-market and faster time to get money because the buyers are there. That is one of the benefits when going into the marketplaces.

The difficulty when you are going to multiple marketplaces is making sure that you are orchestrating inventories, orders, and pricing. For example, how do you stay competitive on Amazon? There are a lot of questions on whether you are selling a commodity item or a unique brand.

If you are competing with other brands, how do you continuously stay competitive with the price? How do you stay efficient in fulfilling the orders? Those are the operational difficulties that you will have when scaling a multichannel business. 

Sramana Mitra: That is where you add value?

Eran Pick: Correct. We add value when we solve problems on the operational and logistics side. If you have a set of items that you are selling, for example, you have 10 pieces and you want to list them in five marketplaces at the time. But you only have 10 pieces, so you need to make sure that you have an inventory management system that can see that.

If you sold on Amazon, then it will update your Facebook, Shopify, and eBay stores. This goes vice versa between stores. You need a system that can maintain the correct inventory. That is an example of one problem that we are solving. In terms of efficiency, rather than going to each marketplace on its own, you can have all the orders in one place and then for the team in the warehouse to efficiently fulfill the orders.

In this way, you are efficient in printing the slips, packing them, and picking the items in a unified way in the warehouse. That is the benefit of working with a platform like ours.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Solid Commerce CEO Eran Pick
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