Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Rick Wilson, President of Miva Merchant (Part 4)

Rick Wilson: On one hand, you have this free-wheeling, open source world where as long as someone knows what they’re doing, they can literally do anything. On the other hand, you have what I call apple-ification where all of the hard choices have been made for you. There’s some brilliance to that for sure. The successes of Shopify, Bigcommerce, and Volution have shown that there’s a demand for that. I would say that’s the biggest change in the last seven years. Today, to be an e-commerce owner, you don’t have to be a particularly technical person whereas in 2007, you needed to be somewhat technical. If you go back farther than that, you absolutely had to be technical to have an advantage.

Sramana Mitra: That’s correct. Shopify and Volution are catering to the more starting merchants. Bigcommerce is catering to the slightly larger sweet spot of $1 million to $30 million revenue. Magento is the larger player. Where do you fit into that picture?

Rick Wilson: I would actually qualify your statement a little bit more. Bigcommerce may think they’re catering to the $1 million to $30 million stores, but they are actually catering to the $50,000 to the $500,000 stores to some extent. In fact, based on the data I’ve seen behind the scenes, I would say, less than 1% of their stores are going to be in the million dollars plus range. I would say we cater specifically to what you were claiming was the Bigcommerce space.

Sramana Mitra: We interviewed Bigcommerce and they said exactly what I said.

Rick Wilson: I can’t argue with what he’s claiming. We analyze their stores a lot. Not just their stores but everyone’s. That’s not what we see when we analyze their stores. Without getting into a back and forth discussion over what Bigcommerce’s customers are, our sweet spot are people doing anywhere from $500,000 to $50 million in online sales.

Sramana Mitra: What is the distribution of that? $500,000 to $50 million is a large band. Are you more in the higher-end of the market?

Rick Wilson: On a pure numbers basis, we have about 20,000 active stores. 4,000 of those active stores are doing north of a million in online sales. That gives a fairly decent color on that.

Sramana Mitra: Which means that you have 16,000 stores that are $500,000 to a million revenue range, right?

Rick Wilson: Correct. We believe we serve both of those spaces very well.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Rick Wilson, President of Miva Merchant
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