Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brian Dhatt, CTO of Borderfree (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Is there any other point that you want to make? Are there any open problems that you are seeing, trying to solve, or want to see entrepreneurs solve?

Brian Dhatt: The other big one that is worth discussing might be mobile, which I know you’re probably hearing a lot about. The funny thing is, outside of the United States, you see a completely different world of mobile. We’re seeing folks transacting inside of chatting applications like WeChat. This is something that hasn’t come to the United States yet. We typically are going direct to merchant websites. You’re not transacting outside those experiences. Moving towards a community-based, content-driven model for commerce is happening aggressively outside the United States. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brian Dhatt, CTO of Borderfree (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: So you calculate duties based on data that you have. You collect that duty when you deliver the goods and pay the duty after the fact.

Brian Dhatt: We show it to them right during checkout. If you’re checking out on J.Crew, you’ll see the duties that would be assessed and pay for them right then. Anything above and beyond that, we actually get billed by the government or by the carriers. We will pay no matter what that duty comes in as.

Sramana Mitra: If you have under-assessed the duty, then you’re going to be taking responsibility for that?

Brian Dhatt: Exactly.

Sramana Mitra: How often does that happen?
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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brian Dhatt, CTO of Borderfree (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like there are three or four different aspects that are issues. One is the payment and the whole currency management aspect. The other is shipping and who is considered as a trusted source for shipping.

Brian Dhatt: On the shipping and the compliance side, that’s a big deal to folks. The typical experience was you would either receive a notice from a customs body that says they’re holding your package until you pay more, or you would actually receive the item and then some weeks later, receive a bill from the government. That’s a horrible experience especially when you don’t know in advance what that bill is going to look like. We moved to a model where we moved that pricing right up front. You see it as part of the transaction. The item shows up on your doorstep just like it should without any additional problems. It’s the same for restricted items. >>>

Billion Dollar Unicorns: JustFab Getting Ready for an IPO

The Census Bureau of the Department of Commerce recently reported the fourth quarter retail e-commerce sales for the US. E-commerce sales during the quarter are estimated to have grown 2.3% over the year to $79.6 billion and accounted for 6.7% of total retail sales. For the full year 2014, e-commerce sales increased 15% to $304.9 billion and accounted for 6.5% of retail sales compared to 5.8% in 2013. Billion Dollar Unicorn club member JustFab.com is a fast-growing member among e-tailing vendors.

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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brian Dhatt, CTO of Borderfree (Part 3)

Brian Dhatt: From a personalization perspective, you can go down to the complex individualized personalization. In the first stage, a lot of times, we can do a lot of personalization as part of the site experience based on things like different seasons globally. For example, in Australia you might be looking for a bikini whereas in New York, you don’t have any desire to do that. We actually think that will play a big role for global merchants.

Sramana Mitra: WebLink has a lot of customers in the apparel space. Personalization based on size is one of the big drivers of lift in terms of financial metrics.

Brian Dhatt: Absolutely. You can only imagine that in the global space, it gets more complex. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brian Dhatt, CTO of Borderfree (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Because you’re at Borderfree, your angle is on the international. We will explore that angle, but I just want to anchor this discussion by pointing out a few other things that I see in e-commerce. We started covering these quite extensively actually. Very recently, we have covered two companies that are each furthering the evolution of high-end e-commerce systems—0ne from the dimension of personalization and another from the dimension of content-driven commerce. Both are massive trends.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with this piece that I wrote in 2007 defining what I see as the formula for Web 3.0. The formula was Web 3.0 = 4C + P + VS. The four Cs are defined as context, community, commerce, and content. P is personalization and VS for vertical search. Now eight years later, we are starting to see systems that address not all of it but >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brian Dhatt, CTO of Borderfree (Part 1)

Borderfree provides tools to help move e-commerce to its next phase: going global. Read on!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to you a little bit as well as all your different e-commerce-related experience so we can set the context for the conversation.

Brian Dhatt: I’m the CTO at Borderfree. That means I’m responsible for our product and product strategy. We are based in New York City and we have offices around the world in Dublin, Ireland as well as in Tel Aviv, Israel. From a path perspective, I came from Gilt Groupe. I led product, engineering, and creatives for Gilt City.

Prior to that, I co-founded POPSUGAR, which is a content commerce company based in San Francisco. We founded that back in 2006 and we were Sequoia-funded. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Keith Anderson, VP Strategy of Profitero (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Where are the opportunities to do new and innovative companies in this whole space?

Keith Anderson: There’s at least a couple of ideas that spring to my mind. There’s always a diffusion of technology over time from the very high-end to the broader mainstream market. Think of technology that originated from the Department of Defense, for example, and then eventually making it to the more mainstream. There’s the lower end disruption that starts as more affordable and reaches the mainstream by meeting the basic need and getting more sophisticated over time. In this area, I think it’s more of the former. >>>