Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Eyelation CEO Brad Kirschner (Part 3)

Brad Kirschner: After you get your eyes checked, you come out and you pick out your glasses. People will measure the distance between your eyes and the height of the bifocals. Our system does the measurements for the fitting and not for the prescription itself. They just bring their prescription to the kiosk.

Sramana Mitra: Where do you see opportunities in e-commerce in general? In particular, in the eyewear space. 

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Eyelation CEO Brad Kirschner (Part 2)

Brad Kirschner: One of the interesting things that has happened as well is, when I started, we spent two years developing the eyewear kiosk. We went out to the market with it. Almost right away, people said, “This is really cool. Can you do this for safety shoes?”

Sramana Mitra: That’s a completely different business.

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Eyelation CEO Brad Kirschner (Part 1)

I have always believed in the power of niche e-commerce to build sustainable businesses. Eyelation is a great example. Read on for more.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself and Eyelation.

Brad Kirschner: I’m the CEO and Founder of Eyelation. We’ve been in business since 2009. I developed a self-service safety eyewear kiosk for factories. It’s available for people to buy their prescription eyewear from. The first one was out in 2011.

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jimmy Duvall, Chief Product Officer of BigCommerce (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I can think of two entrepreneurs that I’ve talked to within our program who would appreciate talking to BigCommerce about what they’re doing. But taking advantage of your ecosystem, how do we connect these dots and how do we explore such opportunities?

Jimmy Duvall: On a personal level, I’ve worked with TechStars. I am a big proponent of this engagement model of helping these entrepreneurs find their way in a sea of everything.

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jimmy Duvall, Chief Product Officer of BigCommerce (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What about logistics? That must be another area where Amazon is a player that you have to interface with.

Jimmy Duvall: Absolutely. They help our retailers handle logistics and fulfillment. It is part of what is this integration that we have with Amazon around the marketplace. It’s a value-add for our customers in many ways.

Amazon is pretty restrictive, in many ways, about who they allow to do what. Obviously for the larger customers that have volume, those logistics and fulfillment capabilities are really core.

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jimmy Duvall, Chief Product Officer of BigCommerce (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How many developers are developing on your ecosystem?

Jimmy Duvall: We have over 300 partners. I can’t necessarily extrapolate that into numbers of developers, but it’s got to be in thousands. We are onboarding everything from design agencies to consultancies like Accenture.

Just a quick anecdote, we were in London last week. We had 250 partners that crossed both the technology vendor ecosystem as well as agencies that really support retailers that are extending, customizing, and making it unique.

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jimmy Duvall, Chief Product Officer of BigCommerce (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What are some other examples of the kinds of platform extensions you’re seeing being delivered through the ecosystem? You mentioned difference of pricing as one.

You were describing how the platform is being extended. I’m just curious. On the path of growing an e-commerce company, what other solutions are required?

Jimmy Duvall: This might be an extreme but I think it’s going to represent the flexibility of what I’m speaking of. One of the core strategies that I brought into the company was how to create an open platform.

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jimmy Duvall, Chief Product Officer of BigCommerce (Part 2)

Jimmy Duvall: It’s a very interesting time in the industry because you have a consolidation of the high-end players. Adobe acquired Magento, Salesforce owns what used to be DemandWare, and Oracle has its own enterprise suite.

All of that is pulling the price point way up. There are a lot of the hosting-oriented vendors operating down at the lower-end of the segment. That mid area is just so ripe right now. With Magento going through their transition to Magento 2, there’s a huge base of companies that are meaning to re-platform as well as the continual updraft of companies.