Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: James Green, CEO of Magnetic (Part 2)

James Green: Let’s take a company like Bluefly. They’re a large online retailer. They sell fashionable clothing. If someone visits their website, we can help them do site retargeting. We can go and say, “You exhibited this behavior in this website. Perhaps we should send you an email because that’s how you like to be communicated with. Perhaps we’ll send you an ad because you opted out of email.”

It could also be that when you visit that site, we’ll customize the site so that it will be relevant to the sorts of trousers, dresses, or whatever it is that you’re in market for. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: James Green, CEO of Magnetic (Part 1)

James points out that in e-commerce and digital marketing, point solutions have become more effective than the broad suites from players like Adobe and Marketo. Read on and see if you agree!

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

James Green: I’m the CEO of Magnetic. Magnetic is a marketing and advertising technology company. The simplest way to think about us is we learn about what you’re looking for when you’re looking to buy something on the Internet through very large and distributed data networks. We help our customers communicate with you either by showing you advertisements or by customizing their web pages or by sending you emails. That’s what we do. >>>

Billion Dollar Unicorns: Online-to-Offline Focus Helps Huimin Enter the Club

According to iResearch Consulting Group, the online-to-offline (O2O) market size is estimated to have grown 38% over the year to RMB 335 billion (~$53.78 billion). The market is expected to grow by over 20% each year through 2018 to be worth RMB 626 billion (~$100.501 billion) in China. China’s Zhongshang Huimin is the latest O2O player to enter the Billion Dollar Unicorn club.

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Startup Idea: E-Commerce Focused on High-end Ceramics

As with other Vision India 2020 ideas, Gagori was also originally designed as a billion dollar project. It focused on using Japanese and Italian designers working with Indian potters and ceramicists to create high-end dinner sets, vases, platters, pots, etc. You can read it here.

Once again, there is a comparable opportunity with some of the same ideas, but without the need to scale at exponential pace. You could build a set of e-commerce businesses that specifically focus on high-end ceramics.
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2016 IPO Prospects: The Honest Company Makes the Online to Offline Model Work

According to a report by Grand View Research, the market for global organic personal care products was estimated at $8.43 billion in 2013. Driven by increasing customer awareness about organic products, this market is expected to grow rapidly in the coming years. In North America, the organic personal care product market was estimated to be worth more than $2.5 billion in 2012 and is expected to grow to nearly $5.5 billion by the year 2020. Jessica Alba’s The Honest Company is an IPO prospect from this market. >>>

Bootstrapping a Niche E-Commerce Venture: Elite Fixtures CEO Steven Annese (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How much inventory did you take on and how did you source that inventory? This is one of the key questions for every bootstrapped e-commerce entrepreneur.

Steven Annese: When I first started, I didn’t take any inventory on. I basically had a drop shop agreement with a major distributor at that time that distributed probably around 20 main brands of lighting, and they were very familiar with the lighting showrooms in the US. I didn’t have to take on any inventory which was a much bigger advantage than stocking a garage full of inventory. You have to also understand that when I launched, I launched with about 20,000 SKUs. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Flywire CEO Mike Massaro (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Where do you recommend entrepreneurs to focus on if they’re looking to work in this space? What kind of problems would you steer them towards?

Mike Massaro: In financial technology cross-border transactions, I think the traditional money remittance space is prime for disruption. It’s not a space we’re directly in, but a lot of the companies out there are looking towards shared ledger technologies. I think we’re going to see people focusing on segments of that vertical.

Our business model is a good example where education payments alone account for about $53 billion in cross-border transactions. A lot of people would look at that volume and would probably put it in the cross-border remittance bucket. You can build a very targeted solution like we have to solve the problem that exists in many cross-border transactions. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Flywire CEO Mike Massaro (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What are the segments besides education? You’ve taken the education use case and fleshed it out. What other big-ticket items are you catering to?

Mike Massaro: Back at Money 2020 Conference in Vegas, we announced medical tourisms reports. In a similar manner to what we do with educational institutions, a number of the largest academic hospitals in the United States came to us and said, “We have the same problem.” We kept hearing about inbound medical tourism patients coming into the United States for knee replacement or cancer treatments. They are these very large dollar amount payments. Sometimes, two to four times larger than what you’d see in education. They have the same problem. >>>