Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Flywire CEO Mike Massaro (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Can you walk me through the work flow? I live in India. I have a child in college at MIT. If I’m the consumer sending the wire, what is my work flow?

Mike Massaro: We work with the educational institution. Our model is that of an international payment processor for that receiver of funds. We sign an agreement with that institution and that institution integrates us into their e-billing process. As part of the notification going to the student, it will often have the amount due. They’ll be driven over to, what we call, a payment experience over at flywire.com. It will be branded for MIT. The consumer can select the country they’re paying fro, in your example, India. Then we share various payment methods supported in local currencies in INR, as well as credit cards and bank transfer.

In India, there’s a specific form that has to be filled out by the parents to send money abroad for education. Our platform will actually take that consumer through filling out the proper information about the student they’re paying for as well as who’s actually making the payment. We pre-populate that A2 form in >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Flywire CEO Mike Massaro (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Talk about the variety of different ways that people do make these kinds of payments. It sounds like education is one of your big segments. Is that your only segment?

Mike Massaro: It isn’t now. We started the company there. We’ve been around for about five years. We had focused on education exclusively. Very recently, we opened up another vertical for medical payments. Hospitals started having a similar challenge. There are these large dollar payments coming from consumers all over the world who are coming for medical care and there’s no easy convenient way to pay. That’s our second vertical that we’ve just opened up and found some great traction there. We opened up other segments as well like consumer large payments. We’ve got a number of other segments that will likely be interesting to us in years to come.

Sramana Mitra: As it pertains to the roots of your business, you are serving a segment of big ticket fund transfer. Is that part of your segmentation?

Mike Massaro: That’s right. It’s typically tens of thousands of dollars. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Flywire CEO Mike Massaro (Part 1)

Have you ever been an international student in a US college or university that required your parents having to transfer money to your school?

Or perhaps have a child studying abroad for whom you have to do this? In either case, you may want to read this interview to learn about how cross-border payments are transforming the efficiency in the sector.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Flywire.

Mike Massaro: I’m the CEO of Flywire. We’re an international payments company. We help global consumers make large payments around the world.

Sramana Mitra: What are the key trends driving your space? >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brian Rigney, CEO of Zmags (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What does this do to the conversion rates? Do you have metrics on how it influences conversion?

Brian Rigney: Beautiful question. It has dramatically helped their conversion rates. It has helped engagement as well. I’ll give you a couple of examples where it helped bring engagement up. From handbags, they saw a 50% increase in page views in the first 10 seconds—the really critical 10 seconds. There was a 20% increase in page views in the next 20 seconds. In the last 30 seconds, they saw a 9% increase in page views. Page views go up every step in that first minute and their conversion rates went up by 111%. Boathouse stores, a small Canadian retailer with 30 locations, saw their page engagement time go up by over 500%. People stayed. Boathouse just won an award from Retail Touch Point for commerce innovation around customer engagement because of their result.

Sramana Mitra: It’s interesting. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the piece that I wrote a long time ago, which has been referred many times and many follow-on articles have been written including a book called From E-Commerce to Web 3.0. The original formula for Web 3.0 that I had published back in 2007 was that Web 3.0 = 4C + P + VS. The 4 C’s are content, commerce, and community in context. P is personalization and VS is vertical search. You’re basically turning up your commerce site into more of a content commerce integrated site. You’ve just added a much more of a magazine-like feel to your commerce catalog. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brian Rigney, CEO of Zmags (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down on your work. I’d like to understand the customer base. What is the target customer base? Also, do some use cases of a couple of your interesting customers that well illustrate what you’re doing.

Brian Rigney: We’ve 1,500 brands across the globe. They represent folks like Marks & Spencer and Getty Images in the UK and across North America, we’ve got New York and Company. The customer base for Publicator is very broad. It’s designed for anyone who has a PDF that they want to put online and create a very rich and engaging experience. The Creator, which is the newest one, is very much focused on the retail sector. They have a high need for creating very rich and very engaging experiences to capture their user’s attention, and to make shopping very easy. You can allow someone to shop the look and it doesn’t force the user to shop in the grid. The grid, as you might suspect, consists of those long rows and columns that are sometimes painful to shop in. They’re not inspiring.

Sramana Mitra: How does this work from a retailer system point of view? The retailer is working off a catalog, right? A catalog has all the product descriptions and images. Where does Zmags come in in that work flow? >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brian Rigney, CEO of Zmags (Part 1)

Content and Commerce are trying to integrate, albeit at  a slow pace. The world order is very far still from my 2007 vision: Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS). Nonetheless, read on to learn about some very interesting developments in the industry.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Zmags.

Brian Rigney: I’m the CEO of Zmags. I joined Zmags just about two years ago. My background before that has been a series of startups including companies like CashStar that does digital commerce through gift cards and other applications.

Sramana Mitra: That’s a Maine company right?

Brian Rigney: That is a Maine company, yes. You can find them at CashStar.com. >>>

From Unicorn to Unicorpse: Etsy Falters on Amazon’s Entry

Etsy (Nasdaq: ETSY) went public earlier this year, a much awaited IPO at an $1.8 billion valuation. But since listing, serious issues with the company have resulted in a tumbling valuation under public market scrutiny. At its current stock price, Etsy is still appearing above the billion dollar mark, but barely so. And its trajectory indicates that Etsy is on its way from being a prized Unicorn to a faltering Unicorpse.

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From E-Commerce to Web 3.0: Wayfair Impressive Even Under Public Scrutiny

According to an IBIS World report, the US online home furnishings market has grown 20% annually over the period 2010 through 2015 to be worth $8 billion. Over the same period, the US online house furniture market grew 16% to $16 billion. Wayfair (NYSE: W) is the largest pure-play online retailer of home goods in the country. Last year, it went public and even under public scrutiny, its performance remains impressive.

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