Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Mark Lavelle, CEO of Magento Commerce (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What about the mid-market? Unless you’re an enterprise-scale company where you can afford very expensive software, can you afford to do complex personalization in the mid-market through platforms like Magento?

Mark Lavelle: Not today. I think it’s the hardest thing out there. It’s still early for true personalization. We need to get modest personalization right first. We also need to Segment customers by the life cycle. There are a lot of signals that we get that we don’t have to turn to personalization. Just because I bought a brown sweater doesn’t mean that you have to keep showing me brown sweaters. Now it’s re-targeting that same damn brown sweater. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Mark Lavelle, CEO of Magento Commerce (Part 6)

Mark Lavelle: The ability to launch and scale applications today is like electricity in your home. It’s getting cheaper and cheaper everyday. We’re entering an era where developers step back in and run these applications and create great experiences. This is a great era of software coming back. We have SaaS applications on the back end to do common things where we’re not differentiating.

An entrepreneur is going to win when they develop the next great digital experience that delivers their product in a great way in, say, Instagram. We have this company called Card that has done a great job with Magento integrating into Instagram. They sell hand-carved wooden iPad covers. They’re beautiful works of art. Their main channel had been Instagram. That’s an example of a great product expertly curated in a great channel where their customer was spending time. That’s exciting. I don’t understand Snapchat at all. What implications does that have for reaching the next customer.

Sramana Mitra: Where would you ask new entrepreneurs to look for opportunities? >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Mark Lavelle, CEO of Magento Commerce (Part 4)

Mark Lavelle: Amazon made availability and fulfillment part of the experience. You are assured that you will get the delivery at a certain date and time. It’s not just the product that’s unique. It’s actually an entire end-to-end experience. There are companies that are doing this.

On our platform, we’ve got Graze. Who would have thought you could reinvent snacking. It’s based out of the UK. It’s a huge business that has created a subscription model for snacking. We have a similar company called Birch Box that has a subscription model. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Mark Lavelle, CEO of Magento Commerce (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How does your audience compete, especially on the logistics end of the spectrum where Amazon is just delivering unbelievable levels of service?

Mark Lavelle: The A-word is a big deal. Amazon has changed forever what consumer expectation is in terms of getting a product.

Sramana Mitra: Totally. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Mark Lavelle, CEO of Magento Commerce (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Clearly, there has been a massive explosion of niche e-commerce. Platforms like Magento as well as a few others that we have covered extensively have played a big role in enabling these companies and built very substantial e-commerce companies. One of my observations is that the bar is going up in terms of the user experience of e-commerce. When we started, it was just being able to buy from a website. Now people are differentiating with a lot more personalization, recommendation, and user experience that is vastly more complex to deliver from a platform point of view. That’s one the trends that I see. How do you see where we are today and what the needs of the market are? >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Mark Lavelle, CEO of Magento Commerce (Part 1)

This is a comprehensive discussion on the current state of the union in e-commerce with the CEO of one of the most popular platforms on which thousands of e-commerce sites are built. The outlook is somewhat scary with Amazon dominating at an alarming scale. But democratization is also on the horizon. Very interesting conversation, and a must-read for everyone who is involved in the e-commerce space.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing yourself as well as Magento.

Mark Lavelle: I’m the CEO of Magento Commerce. We are the largest global platform for digital commerce in the world. We recently spun out of eBay when eBay and PayPal split up about a year ago. >>>

eBay Trying to Take on Amazon with Weak Moves

According to a BI Intelligence report, the US consumers spent an estimated $385 billion online in 2016 and are expected to spend $632 billion in 2020. The report also found that the number of online shoppers in the US grew by nearly 20 million last year to 224 million shoppers.

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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Blue Acorn CEO Kevin Eichelberger (Part 5)

Kevin Eichelberger: If I were looking to create a company or a startup that is going to solve the problems of tomorrow and not just the problems of today, I would look at the way consumers shop and the prediction around how they’re going to shop as the foundation for that. I think that introduces a lot of areas and opportunities and new innovative ideas for entrepreneurship because the way our systems, processes, and teams are designed organizationally are quite antiquated when you think about how people shop in the future.

I’ll break it down this way. Today, people engage in, what I refer to as, destination shopping. They go somewhere with the purpose of buying something. They go to a website. They call a phone number. They drive to a store. They do those things with the intention of buying something. They typically buy multiple things in one setting. They will concentrate their shopping activities when they do these destination events. >>>