Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Rick Wilson, President of Miva Merchant (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: If you were to tell us what you’re seeing in your customer base, what are some of the big trends that you’re seeing right now?

Rick Wilson: There are some broad industry trends that are fairly ubiquitous. Most online stores today are becoming multi-channel. They’re going to be selling through their own store, marketplaces, or may very well be selling in the offline world. Roughly a third of our customers have a brick-and-mortar presence. I think the sense of either a pure play e-tailer or not is gone. People understand that e-commerce is a technology that enables streamlining of your business. We see a lot of what I would call automation and optimization at the lower end or in our space. It wasn’t very long ago when technologies like recommendation engines and automated fulfillment were exclusive to an Amazon, Nordstrom, or Walmart. Those things have now come into our space. We see people running $5 million businesses with one employee. The trend is to enable the ability to do that.

Sramana Mitra: Both of those trends have come up in our work quite a lot. In fact, last week we had the CEO of ShopVisible who extensively discussed the multi-channel e-commerce trend. We are seeing this whole notion of ultra-light startups everywhere. We have numerous case studies in our program of these ultra-light startups. Those are both trends that are very big trends. It’s very easy to run an e-commerce store with very few people. Even solo just from your own apartment. We have a case that I like a lot. It’s a company called WatchUWant. This guy was an eBay seller and went up to $6 million in revenues without a single employee.

Rick Wilson: That’s a great story!

Sramana Mitra: Now the company is $20 million. There are a lot of these stories right now. Can you add color to this ultra-light e-commerce startup story? Is there any sub-trends that you see? We see this trend of zero logistics startups. A lot of these ultra-light e-commerce startups have somehow figured out how to outsource logistics obviously.

Rick Wilson: Another trend that we see the most is a combination of brands going direct and larger companies who have a smaller division. Let’s say you’re Sony. Sony is going to launch a new standalone product. This company needs to operate at the standards of their new parent, yet they’re not going to have the budget of their parents. They’re not going to be able to launch on IBM WebSphere or Demandware. They’re going to need people to do it for $10,000 and they’re going to need to do it without a lot of employees helping. We see a version of that in the brands too. Scottevest is a big customer of ours. He’s ultra-light in the big picture. He has 12 or 15 employees and $12 million plus a year in revenue.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Rick Wilson, President of Miva Merchant
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