Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Blue Acorn CEO Kevin Eichelberger (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like this is also a key open problem around which more innovative solutions are in order and where innovators and entrepreneurs could come up with more innovative solutions.

Kevin Eichelberger: Absolutely. Mobile payments issue is a big opportunity. Mobile user experience is a big opportunity. I think there is a larger underlying shift in retail that will open up even greater opportunities for new ideas, new solutions, and new entrants in the marketplace in terms of a better way to engage with customers. That’s certainly something I could speak further about during the course of the conversation.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s turn it around into something very specific. If you were starting a company today focused on this problem, what kinds of things are in your mind about ways to solve the problem besides the mobile wallet issue? Are there other things that you can do that would be interesting?

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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Blue Acorn CEO Kevin Eichelberger (Part 3)

Kevin Eichelberger: Typically, we’d advise our clients about opportunities to improve the mobile and shopping experience, in particular, the checkout experience. There are two events that happened in 2016 that will create lots of opportunities for brands and retailers to make that process more seamless to an end user. By and large, that will be the opening of Android Pay and Apple Pay for mobile payment methods. Those systems used to only be available if you had a native mobile app. Most people shopping on a mobile device are shopping through mobile web. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Blue Acorn CEO Kevin Eichelberger (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down on that. What are some of the key user experience trends in mobile shopping that your customers need to pay attention to?

Kevin Eichelberger: One of the metrics that still trail behind is the conversion rate for mobile devices. Yes, it is true that more people shop over a mobile device but it is also true that more people purchase on a desktop or laptop device. You have to ask yourself the question as to what is the reason for it. If more people are naturally gravitating towards using mobile devices, why aren’t they completing the purchase at that moment? The big challenge is continuing to understand the modality of people when they’re on their mobile devices – what are they thinking, what are their motivations? >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Blue Acorn CEO Kevin Eichelberger (Part 1)

Did you know that mobile shoppers have a low conversion rate on their devices? People browse on the mobile device, but actually buy on the desktop? Read on more.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s introduce our audience to yourself as well as to Blue Acorn.

Kevin Eichelberger: I’m the Founder of an e-commerce agency called Blue Acorn. We’ve been around for eight and a half years and have worked with B2B and B2C brands helping them solve one problem in two different ways. The problem that we help them solve is how to create the best possible online shopping experience. We either do that through radically changing their online shopping experience or by incrementally improving their online shopping experience. >>>

Billion Dollar Unicorns: Kendra Scott Shows that Women CAN Build Unicorns

According to a report by IBISWorld, the US jewelry store industry is estimated to have grown 1.2% annually through the years 2011 to 2016 to be worth $35 billion in 2016. The industry is expected to grow at a modest 0.4% annually through till 2021, primarily due to the decline in precious metal cost over the years. But decelerating growth rates do not seem to bother the new member of the Billion Dollar Unicorn brigade Kendra Scott.

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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Arish Ali, CEO of Skava (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What I’m hearing is that your retailers are looking for two things. One is they’re looking to do more customization because the experience that they need to provide is more sophisticated. At the same time, they’re looking to cut down on implementation times. Those are the two trends that summarize this conversation. Is that accurate?

Arish Ali: Yes. In the lower end of the retailer spectrum, they’re like, “I want it all fully managed.” The upper end is the opposite. They also don’t want to continue with existing legacy platforms because they’re not good enough. They realize that if their companies are pitted against companies like Amazon, they really have to differentiate. That’s where technology and platform can make a big difference. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Arish Ali, CEO of Skava (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I’m trying to synthesize what I’m hearing here. Could what you’re saying be synthesized by saying that the trend in e-commerce right now is that a lot of the retailers are trying to do omni-channel but are looking for much more custom experiences as opposed to what they can get from the off-the-shelf platforms?

Arish Ali: Yes. We are seeing two distinct trends. There is a whole category of retailers anywhere from $50 million to billions of dollars, which traditionally use these on-premise e-commerce platforms and run their businesses on them. Roughly half of them don’t want to deal with the hassle of maintaining a full IT stack >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Arish Ali, CEO of Skava (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me a bit about specific use cases where customers are leveraging this more customized, more personalized, and more tuned versions of technology.

Arish Ali: We have lots of large retailers, but we can’t talk about all of them publicly. There are many customers who are doing cool stuff with our technology, and for various reasons, we can’t talk publicly about them. One of them runs their mobile site on our platform. We have helped them power and build an optimized mobile experience. Similarly, we have other large retailers. In most cases, what they have done is create a mobile experience where it is a much faster experience than the traditional desktop site where it has a better converting experience and where it is easier to transact. >>>