Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Solid Commerce CEO Eran Pick (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: At which point does it make sense for merchants to start working with a player like you? 

Eran Pick: I think it’s a matter of your role and the type of seller you are. If you are a professional seller, this being your full-time job, then you need a solution like Solid Commerce to manage the business so that it will enable you to grow.

Your growth will be inhibited by your ability to solve all those operational frictions. This is not where you should be focusing on. You should be focusing on the marketing and the product and not on the logistics of managing the inventory and order flows. 

Sramana Mitra: Do people start their e-commerce ventures with you?

Eran Pick: Typically, what you see is on the smaller end, they will start with the order management. They will start with that and start having all the order flowing into one solution.

Now we have orders connected to go to ordersconnect.com. It’s a free multichannel order management solution. It’s targeted at the SMBs. They can log in and connect all their sales channels from all the marketplaces and start printing labels with FedEx, UPS, and USPS. We have discounted shipping for all of those carriers.

You will see those merchants then grow to inventory management solutions and then grow to content management solutions. You typically see that in the SMB to mid-market, they like our end-to-end solution, which includes everything from listing in a marketplace, managing inventory, printing the labels, and pushing it back to the marketplaces.

That is the end-to-end process that the mid-market enjoys. In the enterprise customers, you see that they are using us as a gateway to the marketplaces. They might have more mature WMSs and ERPs in place, but those systems are not natively connecting to the marketplaces. We will connect to the different WMSs of the world and connect those systems to the marketplaces. 

Sramana Mitra: How do you position yourself compared to a ChannelAdvisor for example?

Eran Pick: ChannelAdvisor was created as a sell-more company. They will do Google marketing and ads on the marketplaces. We do not manage the paid ads on the marketplaces. There are some great companies that can do that. On the flip side, we focus more on the logistics and the operations and our ability to connect with 3PL and ERP. We are more of a logistics and operational platform and ChannelAdvisor is more of a marketing platform. 

Sramana Mitra: Very helpful to put the ecosystem maps together. I’m going to switch to a different question. E-commerce is booming and I’m sure you are seeing great traction in the market. In that process, what open problems are you noticing that need to be solved, something that you and your competitors are not solving but would like to see new entrepreneurs solve?

Eran Pick: It’s an interesting question. There are a few problems in the market. One is the ability for a merchant to reduce the friction of using the software solution. You mentioned ChannelAdvisor.

If you are looking at that level of friction that is required to engage with a solution like that, it’s enormous. The level of effort that you need to engage and the level of friction that you have when you need to integrate those systems like ERP and WMS are immense.

We are on the cusp of a huge transformation in the user experience. It’s the same huge transformation from the release of Windows 95 in terms of the user experience. Everything that is happening right now with machine learning and other technologies will reduce the friction in using software solutions.

The more you reduce that friction, the more your solutions will scale and the easier it is for your merchants. There is a lot out there. This includes the ability to reduce the human engagement within those solutions. There is a huge opportunity there in making software easier. 

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Solid Commerce CEO Eran Pick
1 2