Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Bob Dufour, President of Fusion (Part 7)

Bob Dufour: It’s having someone who can start understanding the psychology of that consumer and the opportunities presented to digital retailers. At least in my experience, that’s a big missing gap for somebody who really understands those needs during that journey, especially as millennials start taking hold and as their purchasing power gets bigger. I think they’re used to 99 cents. Trying to sell something for $30 is going to be a real shock to them. These microproducts with microprices is going to be important. Technology integration, cross-device integration, and digital enablement of suppliers—those are the things that I would say are opportunities that jump out based on our business.

Sramana Mitra: Listening to you, I’m thinking about this article that I wrote a long time ago in 2007 for the first time. It’s a definition of Web 3.0 that I came up with, which is a formula: 4C + P + VS. The four Cs are content, community, commerce, context, with personalization and vertical search. You may want to look up some of that writing because a lot of what you’re saying is the commerce elements driving off any context.

Bob Dufour: Interesting. I wish I’d known you in 2007. It’s still relevant today.

Sramana Mitra: Not only relevant, but still unachieved. In fact, last Fall we published a book called From E-Commerce to Web 3.0. You’ll find that on Amazon Kindle which really elaborates on that topic.

Bob Dufour: Here’s one of the things that you asked a while ago that I think is a very cool application. This may be in your Web 3.0. This is something that we’re trying to enable here. I foresee the time where we can personalize web experience by using Big Data and analytics. Right now, I can get attitudinal, behavioral, and demographic information. I can get all of these stuff real time. Now I’ve got all of this information about the consumer and I’ve got what they want to buy with me. I should be able to do a number of things like predict my ability to acquire that consumer. I should be able to predict my ability to sell other things to that consumer and profitability of that consumer. I should also be able to predict how long I can keep that customer. In the very near future, I really think that this will start changing the way in which we price and approach customers. We should be able to project lifetime value at the moment a customer raises their hand. I think that’s going to be a big game changer. Where I sit with Fusion, I can see us getting to that pretty rapidly. I think that’s going to be a cool change.

Sramana Mitra: Excellent. Thank you very much for your time.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Bob Dufour, President of Fusion
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