Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Rick Wilson, President of Miva Merchant (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In 2007, what was the landscape in the e-commerce shopping cart or the e-commerce platform world? What was going on around you? What was the competitive landscape? Whom did you compete with directly and indirectly?

Rick Wilson: Yahoo stores was still a popular platform. I wouldn’t say that it had momentum, but it was certainly popular. The osCommerce software, which had been very popular, had faltered. I was never a big osCommerce guy, so I can’t remember if they released version three or four. They were in between major versions and it just died on the vine. They never got the major version out. I think Magento’s alpha was announced during that time. Shopify was just starting to arrive on the scene. I heard about them in 2008. Volution was probably the earliest success story as a pure play Software as a Service platform provider in our space. >>>

Building a Subscription E-Commerce Business from Switzerland: Samy Liechti, CEO of Blacksocks (Part 1)

Samy Liechti has built up a very nice subscription e-commerce business from Switzerland selling socks, underwear, and shorts. The company is 100% bootstrapped.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Samy Liechti: I’m Swiss and grew up in Switzerland. I went to one of the finest European business schools. I studied Business and Economics in Switzerland, Paris, and Toronto. After graduating, I worked in marketing and communications before I opened up my own company. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jacob Cooke, CEO of Web Presence in China (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: That is also the beginning of the rise of more fragmented industries right? Let’s say that these larger brands that are operating on Tmall start to be able to track customers and build a trusted relationship with the consumer. Let’s say the first time the transaction happens on Tmall, the user is starting to get familiar with the brand. Then I imagine they would start feeling comfortable buying from that brand off Tmall.

Jacob Cooke: Yes, that depends. Every company that we deal with has different channel strategies and channel partners, but that’s true. It could work vice versa. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Rick Wilson, President of Miva Merchant (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You were working as Head of North America Sales and the game plan was to orient the product to be sold by the hosting providers.

Rick Wilson: That is correct. We were very successful with that. Between 1998 and 2004, which was when we stopped that process, we signed up 3,500 hosting providers. During that window, we sold about 300,000 active licenses. We were very dominant from a market share standpoint. There was one fundamental problem during that whole time. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jacob Cooke, CEO of Web Presence in China (Part 6)

Jacob Cooke: One more thing I should point out is it’s not that you can’t contact those users. Even with those unique identifiers on Tmall, it’s actually the same as their AliWangwang account, which is similar to Skype. You still can contact that user. You just have to work within that ecosystem. You have enough consumer data to work with. You always have the shipping addresses as well, so you can go and send offline flyers. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Rick Wilson, President of Miva Merchant (Part 1)

Miva caters to 20,000 e-commerce merchants and Rick Wilson discusses the trends he sees in their customer base, as well as the industry in general.

Sramana Mitra: Welcome to the Thought Leaders in E-Commerce Series. Tell us a bit about yourself as well as Miva Merchant. Tell us what you do and how did you get to where you’ve gotten to.

Rick Wilson: Thank you for having me. I’m the President of Miva Merchant. From the way most companies are structured, I take what we would normally consider as the CEO role. We’re an SMB e-commerce platform. In the scheme of the market, our customers are larger than what you might see on a Shopify or a Bicommerce revolution. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jacob Cooke, CEO of Web Presence in China (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What happens if you’re a new merchant?

Jacob Cooke: If you’re a new merchant, you’re in the sandbox for 30 days. That can be tough. You probably want to focus on pricing for the first 30 days. You also might want to up the guarantee level. Basically, every sector is different. One of the most competitive sectors is clothing. That’s basically what we want to do. We want to go in and benchmark where everybody else is at. You probably want to make a few sample purchases with those guys. You want to be a little bit better. You’ll probably engage our firm, for example, to set those bars for your people with experience to create that fulfillment system. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jacob Cooke, CEO of Web Presence in China (Part 4)

Jacob Cooke: Some of the software that we’ve developed plugs into all of the stores, so we can actually take products, put them in warehouses, and fulfill for JD.com, Yihaodian, or Tmall out of one logistics center. Once you’ve got your legal and licensing details worked out, they really push you towards getting into the platform. >>>