Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Rick Wilson, President of Miva Merchant (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: E-commerce has been a category where a lot of people have bootstrapped businesses to some scale. You talked about your sweet spot being this half a million to million range. A large portion of that is probably bootstrapped businesses right?

Rick Wilson: Absolutely, I would say the vast majority.

Sramana Mitra: What are you hearing from this community? Are these people trying to scale? What is the thought process in your community? >>>

Building a Subscription E-Commerce Business from Switzerland: Samy Liechti, CEO of Blacksocks (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. In 2005, you said you had the biggest growth year. What kind of numbers did you do?

Samy Liechti: We had 75% growth. The reason was very simple. We had won an award for customer experience in the US. I remember we had a whole bunch of PR coverage all over the place. We did not have enough people, socks, and time. This brought us to the next level. I think 70% growth in one year is a lot. We had to adopt processes, systems, and so on. That was the biggest growth ever. Usually, we have 20% a year. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Rick Wilson, President of Miva Merchant (Part 6)

Rick Wilson: The trend we see there is that they want to go direct. They want to build a community around their product. I think Kickstarter has really brought that down even from the million dollar plus range to the zero dollar plus range where you can do a product video, get a personality out there, and build a community. Once you build a community, you have enough momentum to go figure out the logistics. If you’re selling a single SKU, outsourcing fulfillment is easy. If you’re selling jewelry and you have 5,000 SKUs, it gets a little more challenging. Even all of those problems are now solvable by one to five person teams, which was impossible a decade ago.

Sramana Mitra: I would say e-commerce is probably the domain that is seeing the maximum impact of ultra-light startups. Would you agree with that? >>>

Building a Subscription E-Commerce Business from Switzerland: Samy Liechti, CEO of Blacksocks (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Were all these customers in Switzerland?

Samy Liechti: We have different currencies and languages here. We were not prepared for payments outside Switzerland. We only had Swiss Francs. All of a sudden, we had our first German customers. Then we started the same for Germany. Little by little, we introduced other currencies and then other payment methods like credit cards. I remember, in the early stage, a Japanese customer wanted to order and we weren’t able to process the credit card. One of his cousins was on a holiday in the Swiss Alps. He still had some cash left, so he sent it in an envelope and we sent him the socks to Japan. >>>

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. >>>

Building a Subscription E-Commerce Business from Switzerland: Samy Liechti, CEO of Blacksocks (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did you get to these articles? Were you doing PR outreach to the press?

Samy Liechti: We did a press release. At that time, we did that by fax. Then we put together a list of potential journalists. Then we had a little luck. By the time we launched, the Internet hype had arrived here in Europe. It was always the same examples of eBay, Amazon, and some others. People suddenly started wondering if there’s something going on in our country. There was not much going on, so the socks guys got quite some coverage. >>>

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? >>>

Building a Subscription E-Commerce Business from Switzerland: Samy Liechti, CEO of Blacksocks (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How did you do it? How did you launch? What did you do specifically?

Samy Liechti: We knew that marketing will be very hard. We knew that a subscription business will only work if people like the quality of goods they receive. We knew that we wanted to build a brand, and we knew that we don’t have time to solve all the problems. We did a couple of things. One thing was we spent a lot of time discussing which problems we wanted to address. We selected only one or two and then we solved them.

Sramana Mitra: Which ones were those? >>>