Q&A: Vikram Saxena, founder and CEO at BetterCommerce
Here we have a Q&A with Vikram Saxena, founder and CEO at BetterCommerce, who is a self-taught programmer and has been leading successful IT services companies since 2007.
He established BetterCommerce in 2016 and will be participating in a panel discussion at The Retail Conference hosted by The Retail Bulletin on 6 November.
Can you tell us a bit about your background?
Over 25 years ago I became a trainer of Microsoft Office. Then when my bike was stolen I decided to buy a computer, a Pentium III. I then taught myself to programme in 24 hours on an intensive home course and thought I should do this for the rest of my life. For the next 10 years I worked in the corporate world including a three-year stint in Germany that included designing and implementing a B2B commerce platform for Tech Data (that traded as Computer 2000 in the UK) in 2004. It was used by more than 150,000 resellers across Europe. When returning back to India in 2007 I started my own IT services business.
What does your company do and what is your USP?
I was inspired to build the BetterCommerce platform with the USP that it’s an end-to-end holistic solution. Larger players have big technology teams to do their integrations whereas the mid-market has no resources or money so they end up with sub-par plug-ins. We let companies address their B2B and B2C markets/customers from the same platform. They can manage it all from one piece of software and maintain it more easily among other benefits.
What’s special about the platform and your approach?
We do the whole specification from product management to e-commerce, search, order management, analytics and provide the customer data platform. We bring it all together and there’s no hoops to jump through and we help companies avoid having to bolt things together.
What advantage does it add?
Reduced time to market, lower total cost of ownership, greater control, flexibility to extend the capabilities of the solution, and much better control of the technology stack. We can ultimately help create bespoke journeys for customers.
How does a product/service implementation actually look like and how do you measure success?
We’ll typically implement in a three-to-six months cycle whereas we’ve seen a lot of competitors take two years. It’s down to the people, processes, product, and technology. People often go for the shiniest product but they should go more for people and processes.
Success is measured by time and budgets and increased conversion rates as well as the ability to handle higher traffic peaks, no down-time, managing the business more efficiently and less overheads. One company had 40 people in the business doing £3 million but with our solution they went down to eight people and sales reached £9.5 million.
How are retailers using your systems to gain competitive advantage and what does best practice look like? Can you share a case study with us?
We work with The Fragrance Shop and they’ve enjoyed seven to eight-times growth from implementing an omni-channel solution on our platform including membership and subscription initiatives. We’ve kept costs lean for them and they are now doing £100 million online with only a small team. They’ve consistently grown year-on-year with their B2B and B2C arms.
Are there other companies you partner with?
Various tech companies such as payment gateway providers and email marketing companies. It’s driven by our customers. They’ll say they want a certain application and we’ll integrate it via APIs. We offer this as value-add to the customer. We’re very customer centric. We’re also looking to partner with a lot of system integrators.
What challenges and opportunities do you see for 2024/5?
The opportunity for us is our focus on the B2B side of retail. A lot of retailers are now hybrid with B2B and B2C but they have ended up with one side being manual while on the other side they have a stack of technology. We bring both the divisions together on one platform. One example of our unique solution is our newly-built WhatsApp app for our trade portal where we’ve added an app onto the messaging service where business customers can check stock, search for products, place orders, and check their order status. This will ultimately replace phone and web ordering for B2B customers that will save lots of time on administration. It is one way we are bringing workflows together.
The challenge for us is to boost brand awareness through marketing activities. The feedback has been positive from those companies that we’ve been introduced to. The UK retail sector is saturated with technology solutions. It’s overwhelmed and it’s become a problem. What do retailers pick and how do they go about it. What to select? This is a challenge in the industry.
What is on the horizon for you as a company?
We want to be the default choice for the B2B commerce side of companies, and for businesses where there is complexity in the product offering, as well as those organisations that are operating a hybrid model. It’s a very ambitious goal but you need to have a vision.
Any final thoughts?
Our repositioning as a B2B solutions provider is working well and we’re moving in a positive direction, helped by the fact the B2B market is probably 10 years behind B2C. The B2B businesses can’t continue to simply say ‘we’ve always done things this way’. The problems still remain when they digitalise their businesses.
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