It was at Wharton where I co-founded my retail business, an e-commerce company named BodyMatrix, which my wife, Debra, helped start. It seemed natural that we would want to be like my parents and Sam Walton, to seek ground truth in this new virtual medium. As a shopper, you couldn’t touch or feel any of the products online. As a retailer, you couldn’t see how your customers found you or where they were getting frustrated when unable to find what they were shopping for. And you couldn’t interact with them in real-time online, only via email after the fact.
This spurred me to create my own analytics and personalization system on top of the e-commerce platform that I had built. It was a eureka moment to say the least once I was done with the initial version – it gave me a “bigger brain” than my parents ever had in their physical retail stores. I could monitor exactly what customers were doing by capturing all of their clickstream behavior, leveraging cookies as unique customer identifiers, and storing it in a large data warehouse with a smaller data mart running on top.
Seeking to make my own data and analytics system better, I met my Wharton friends that worked at both Amazon and CDNow to learn of the tools they used and just how that had done this. To my surprise, they urged me to start a company to provide this for online retailers like them (one of them was Matt Laessig, who is one of my co-founders and our COO here at data.world). When I was about to graduate in 1999, I founded Coremetrics, which was named after the core metrics that retailers desperately needed to run their online businesses. Dot-coms were flying blind back then, and they absolutely loved the cambodia whatsapp number data visibility we gave them. They went from basic metrics that really didn’t matter, like pageviews and unique visitors, to much more robust metrics powered by Coremetrics. Our tools of insight enabled look-to-book ratios on each product, browser-to-buyer conversion ratios, advertising-clickthru-to-sales ratios, individual prospect and customer profiles of clickstream behavior that could be used for targeting email campaigns and personalized offers, and much more.
We founded Coremetrics too late though – the dot-com bust that started in 2000 was right around the corner and 97 of our 100 customers ultimately went out of business after the bubble bust. But then we won Walmart and built Coremetrics by helping traditional retailers that were launching online, providing them with far better metrics to run their e-commerce business than any of the dot-coms had before. Coremetrics made me fall in love with data as the most powerful resource to create culture change, sustainability, and resilience through the toughest of economic times.
This journey continued with my next business, Bazaarvoice. We pioneered customer reviews for retailers and brands online all over the world. There were only three retailers in the U.S. with customer reviews online when we started, but Bazaarvoice quickly became ubiquitous, operating across more than 40 international languages. Bazaarvoice taught retailers exactly what customers thought about their products. Four-star reviews often included descriptions from customers like, “I would have rated it five stars if only it had this or that feature.” Product returns are very costly for retailers in an already low-margin business. Bazaarvoice taught retailers and brands exactly why products were being returned.
I’ll never forget when Walmart, again one of our early customers at Bazaarvoice, told their suppliers that they would return low-rated products not just from their online division but from all of their physical stores as well. It made their supply chain far more customer-centric. Brands like Samsung started to pay an incredible amount of attention to Walmart’s customer reviews, powered by a direct data feed from Bazaarvoice. Like Coremetrics, we hosted customer summits and it was incredible to hear both brands and retailers talk about how much they were diving into the data of customer reviews, and how much more efficient it was making their sales, returns, and partnerships with their suppliers. Sam Walton would have been proud.