The Future of Commerce: Untapped Potential
I had the opportunity to talk with Kelly Goetsch, Chief Strategy Officer at commercetools, about the current state of eCommerce, what the future will look like and how companies can prepare themselves to be ready for the next stage of commerce. In the first part of the interview series, we focus on the current potential of commerce and what is in store in the future.
Interview with Kelly Goetsch, Chief Strategy Officer at commercetools
I had the opportunity to talk with Kelly Goetsch, Chief Strategy Officer at commercetools, about the current state of eCommerce, what the future will look like and how companies can prepare themselves to be ready for the next stage of commerce. In the first part of the interview series, we focus on the current potential of commerce and what is in store in the future.
Dennis: Let’s start with a warm-up question: What has been your most interesting or weirdest experience when it comes to eCommerce?
Kelly: I launched ulta.com as the very first eCommerce platform for Ulta Beauty. Today Ulta has about $3 billion a year online in revenue. But I launched. I was there. I pressed the button. And there was an issue with the DNS. The DNS thought that Ulta was a Russian word. So, it created a free parking page in Russian for ulta.com for the entire night. As a result, I had all sorts of very panicked executives from Ulta in the middle of the night, trying to figure out how to get all this Russian stuff off their website and instead have the actual ulta.com where you can shop and buy things.So, I learned more about DNS that night than I ever wanted to. It was not our problem,
thankfully. It was a problem of Network Solutions. They registered thousands and thousands of domain names, and they just automatically took a guess at what the language of the site was based on the domain name. And then they just give you a free parking page that says: "Hey your website is here. Upload your website."
Dennis: I can imagine that everyone was stressed out back then, even though nowadays you can laugh about it. Since then, digitalization has taken a big leap forward in many places around the world, especially during the Corona pandemic. What do you think is the future of eCommerce in general?
Kelly: I think we are just getting started. We are very early in the industry right now and I say that because if you look at eCommerce penetration as a percentage of total retail, it is still a small amount. Depending on the stats in China, it is more than 50%. In a lot of Western countries, it is in the tens.And if you look at many product categories, they are completely untouched by eCommerce. So, things like furniture, it is a couple of percent there. Or if you look at a lot of the B2B use cases like industrial supply. I still get catalogs mailed to me, which is ridiculous. So, I think for many product categories eCommerce is just beginning. There are a lot of interesting new use cases that never used to even be a thing a couple of years ago. We see the depth, the penetration increasing. But we also see the breadth increasing as well, and that many more use cases are now being used for this. For example, shoppable TV: NBC Universal is one of our customers, and they are making their shows shoppable. Or look at Audi and BMW use cases for in-car connected commerce.
