Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Arish Ali, CEO of Skava (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How many retailers have you worked with in this journey so far?

Arish Ali: 25 to 30.

Sramana Mitra: These are large retailers?

Arish Ali: We, almost exclusively, focus on large retailers, because they have bigger budgets. We always made sure that we were making money from each of the contracts we signed. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Arish Ali, CEO of Skava (Part 1)

Can you imagine what a retailer has to go through these days in their effort to stay cutting edge? Amazon is innovating at a furious pace, and all online retailers are scrambling to keep up. This interview discusses some of their challenges.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Skava.

Arish Ali: Skava is a Silicon Valley-based startup that was founded in 2002 in San Francisco. My co-founder and I wanted to bet big on mobile. This was 2002 >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Deren Baker, CEO of Jumpshot (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What are the emerging trends in the space and where do you see open problems?

Deren Baker: The biggest problem that we see out there is basically the one that we’re trying to solve. Most e-commerce companies or anyone who wants to understand their consumers’ online behavior have a very myopic field. They don’t have that larger lens to take a step back and say, “It’s great that I know what my consumer is doing on my own website.”

I’ve created this very complicated customer journey map with 500 interactions that you can have. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Deren Baker, CEO of Jumpshot (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Obviously, there is the keyword analysis capabilities that Google offers that is relatively public. Are you talking about data that is more granular than that? Are you talking about actually following your user through their Google search patterns that are related to Dove? If so, where do you get that data from? Who has that data and why is that okay to give that data to anybody?

Deren Baker: We are talking about the ability to trace that entire consumer segment behavior. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Deren Baker, CEO of Jumpshot (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How do you get your data? What part of that data is private and how can you manage to get to that data?

Deren Baker: We license the data from third-party partners. All the data they acquire is exclusively opted-into from their end consumers. We’ve got a patent on an algorithm that looks into clickstream sources, strips out anything that is personally-identifiable information and then leaves us with that residual data.

Sramana Mitra: Whom do you license this kind of data from? Who has access to this kind of data?

Deren Baker: There’s a whole host of people who have access to this kind of data—from security companies to ISPs and mobile carriers. We are just in the >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Deren Baker, CEO of Jumpshot (Part 1)

Digital data is driving e-commerce in a huge way, and this will get more intense as we go along. This conversation explores trends, sources, and use cases of digital data.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Jumpshot.

Deren Baker: I’m the CEO of Jumpshot. Jumpshot is a marketing analytics company that helps any company understand its customers’ entire online life. We do that through a panel of a hundred million users’ clickstream. We slice and dice that clickstream behavior to help our customers understand everything from the entire customer journey of a specific audience all the way down to helping them isolate customer segments who are about to take a specific behavior like buy a car or go on a vacation. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: James Green, CEO of Magnetic (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What size are we talking in revenue terms?

James Green: The sweet spot for us is total online sales of $5 million to $100 million. There are a couple of people who are a bit bigger but mostly, they’re in that range.

Sramana Mitra: Switching gears, what are the emerging trends in e-commerce that you see as significant and what are the open problems in the context of those changes. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: James Green, CEO of Magnetic (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In the context of that, answer my question on retargeting specifically. You did bring up retargeting as one of the areas that you have specialized expertise in. I’m curious about retargeting specifically.

James Green: Retargeting, initially, was just an end of the shopping cart. You chase them to say come back with a discount. That expanded to be much more sophisticated. There is a lot of data science that says, “You’ve exhibited this particular behavior on the website and so you don’t have to abandon the shopping cart or put anything in for us to figure out that these patterns mean that you are in market to buy something.”

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