Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Gerrit Kolb, CEO of CoreMedia (Part 3)

Gerrit Kolb: Basically, there are two outcomes. Number one is that the story that you’re telling allows you to create packages that are combined with stories that are entertaining and sticky for the customer. The customer comes back because he wants to hear the stories about specific areas of interest. Secondly, people are able to find you because the SEO optimization doesn’t have to trickle. We have real content. At the heart of it, you have to have the ability to tell stories. Stories are always combined with text copies. They’re always rich media. There’s always pictures. There’s social commenting and rating. All of these things make a story engaging and compelling. That is the key for the retailers to survive. That’s a huge development. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Gerrit Kolb, CEO of CoreMedia (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Help me understand the correlation with e-commerce.

Gerrit Kolb: Typically, e-commerce solutions deal with making the product catalog available through a website. You end up having a grid where you can pick which product you want, what color you want, what quality you want, and what size you want. Then you have a shopping cart that lets you check out. This is really the cash register from a brick-and-mortar store perspective. What is missing, and this is something that is key to all the e-commerce solutions today, is everything that drives your customer to your website. That actually deals with motivating people to buy from you. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Gerrit Kolb, CEO of CoreMedia (Part 1)

You have heard me talk about a vision for Web 3.0 since 2007, when I first published my Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS) equation. In this interview, we discuss how the systems behind the scene are coming along to make a full Web 3.0 user experience possible.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some introduction about your company CoreMedia. Let’s introduce our audience to yourself as well as to the company.

Gerrit Kolb: CoreMedia has been in business for about 19 years. At the very beginning of the Internet, CoreMedia started to develop software that was related to the management of structured content. That was quickly picked up by most of the media and telco companies in Central Europe. CoreMedia became, I would say, the heart and soul and the backbone of most of the media sites operating in Central Europe. As I said, our roots are media and telco, which is typically where the leading edge >>>

eBay Spinning Off – Yet Again

According to a recent comScore report, the total online retail spending for the November–December period in 2014 was estimated to grow 16% to $61 billion. The researcher expected sales through mobile devices to see higher growth rates. Desktop generated e-tail sales were projected to grow 14% to $53.2 billion and mobile commerce was expected to grow 25% to $7.9 billion. According to the ChannelAdvisor Same Store Sales (SSS) report, during the November-December period, holiday sales did report the expected 16% growth.

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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Darren Hill, CEO of WebLinc (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What are you able to do? What strategies do you follow to make that an instant fit in some sense on the mobile phone?

Darren Hill: If you think about products, products have attributes and tags. The consumer uses those tags to find products on the website. The biggest thing we’re doing is tagging the customer. We look at searches that the customer makes based on past purchases, the last place the customer has been, or even the way they shop. Some shoppers are shopping for something very specific. Some shoppers are shopping to fill their closets. Some shoppers are buying gifts. We’re doing a lot of work to identify what type of shoppers are here. Those shoppers actually respond differently to different page layouts. Someone who’s buying just a pair of jeans is much interested in seeing those jeans >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Darren Hill, CEO of WebLinc (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: One question on Nasty Gal and the scalability point, what are the issues? What are we trying to solve?

Darren Hill: The issue is making sure the site is up. It works for all of your customers and they’re getting the environment that they’re expecting. For us, it’s really a technology play. Our systems are built on Ruby on Rails with a MongoDB database on the back-end. That technology allows us to rapidly scale in a virtual environment so that we can add new servers very easily. We can handle insane amounts of traffic almost seamlessly.

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about pricing. I know the pricing of some of these other players that are serving much larger number of customers. You seem to be serving 100 customers that are much larger. I imagine your pricing is very different from theirs. Talk to me a bit about how you charge.
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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Darren Hill, CEO of WebLinc (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How do you do the recommendation on what goes with what? Is that a manual recommendation system or is there technology that enables scaling of something like that?

Darren Hill: It’s a mix. There are several data points that go into it such as what people have bought and what they have looked at. That’s the easy one and something that everybody’s been doing for years. The shoppers can put products together in their own category. They’re being a stylist, if you will, on the site. We use that data as well. We are able to see which customer is the best stylist based on how much sales is generated through what they’re suggesting. Then we have professional stylists who work there. They’re also putting this information in. We essentially take those data points and make the suggestion based on all of that. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Darren Hill, CEO of WebLinc (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I see it.

Darren Hill: It’s quite powerful. People share them like crazy. Our site allows hearting and comments and the customer base is very active.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. When you put something up on the website, I’m sure you are seeing huge amounts of social media sharing.

Darren Hill: Absolutely. That is the key. That was almost a by-product of allowing people to upload their information. The big value was that these girls are excited that they’re on the Free People site. >>>