BGV recently hosted a webinar discussion with Nicolas Stehle, the founder of Scalefast.
To view this webinar on-demand, please click here.
Prior to the pandemic, many brands lacked the online retail infrastructure required to successfully scale their eCommerce business. Contrary to popular belief, direct-to-consumer (DTC) business represents just one to two percent of a company’s overall revenue, as brands tend to rely exclusively on brick-and-mortar business to drive sales. Nike and Apple, the two outliers, earn approximately 20-25% of their revenue via DTC, with Nike seeking to increase its DTC to account for approximately half of their overall revenue over the next few years. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, forced companies into the eCommerce space, whether by design or by default.
As businesses struggle to shift operations online and adopt a broader mix of digital sales strategies, many are left with the challenge: “Do we sell our products via a third party platform, or attempt to construct our own digital storefront?” Third party channel distributors, such as Amazon, function as a buffer for brands, as Amazon handles GDPR compliance, local taxes, customer support, shipping, and logistics. The caveat is that Amazon controls what products your business can sell on their platform, as well as their cost, while your consumers build a relationship with Amazon, not you. Businesses can opt to utilize platforms such as Shopify or Salesforce to create and maintain their digital storefront, but companies are saddled with handling customer service, logistics, digital maintenance, shipping, local taxes, and GDPR compliance.
Building a fully functional direct-to-consumer platform and a frictionless digital storefront is a complex challenge. It can take between two and four years to properly execute and cost millions of dollars. However, in the face of a global pandemic, and the overnight shift to digitized and automated business processes, demand for platforms like Scalefast has skyrocketed.
Scalefast as a solution
Founded to address this critical problem in the eCommerce world, Scalefast allows companies to focus on customer relationships instead of undertaking all the complicated aspects of a DTC rollout, such as international shipping, logistics, taxes, GDPR compliance, and generating the digital storefront itself. Scalefast utilizes AI to help businesses scale remarkably quickly, and launch digital sales operations in as little as two weeks time. Their state-of-the-art optimization, caching, and auto-scaling techniques allow digital stores to handle high-volume merchants, over 21,000 orders per minute, and massive sudden traffic peaks without slowing the site’s loading times.
With foot traffic plummeting at traditional retail stores, brands must be able to rapidly and easily shift their business strategies to match the ever changing habits of their customers. Companies like Amazon have conditioned a massive customer segment to expect streamlined sales and distribution including such luxuries as two-day shipping, ease of payment, and thousands of product options at a low cost. These users have been habituated to an eCommerce standard that includes the ability to purchase everything they need online including frictionless payments and glitchless web operations. A study at Baymard Institute demonstrated that companies can increase their conversion rate by up to 36% by simply optimizing checkout flow and design. Scalefast, which has mastered these two features, helps brands meet best in breed standards in the eCommerce industry so they can maintain a loyal customer base, and expand out to new segments, at a time when the DTC trend surges in popularity.
Scalefast history
An emerging leader in the eCommerce space, Scalefast brings together enterprise commerce cloud with global business infrastructure to help brands rapidly scale their eCommerce businesses into international markets, quickly, efficiently and painlessly. Originally founded in Europe, Scalefast expanded to the United States in 2014, with offices in Los Angeles, and has recently developed an increased presence in Asia. Scalefast currently aids European and American companies enter the Australian market while also helping Japanese companies enter the American market and vice versa. The company works with high-profile brands such as Sega, Bandai Namco Entertainment, Hasbro, Capcom, and L’Oreal.
Scalefast is headed by serial entrepreneur Nicolas Stehle, who has built five companies in the past twenty years in the fields of eCommerce, network security, big data, and payments. His rap sheet includes founding and executive roles in Like Me I’m Famous, Everbee, Slimpay and Flexycore, the first French company ever acquired by Google. His companies maintained operations around the world including California, Taiwan, South Korea, Madrid, Paris, and London. All of this experience, across industry, geography and roles has come to bear in Scalefast. “With your name,” says BGV’s Eric Buatois, “you have no choice but to be highly successful.”
As the global eCommerce industry continues growing, a sort of flattening has occurred introducing new competition. Global innovation hubs around the world are emerging online to compete with brands in Silicon Valley and with traditional innovation centers, and are now outperforming them. On Black Friday, Shopify did $2.5 Billion USD of sales in Europe and the United States, while the Asian platform Alibaba did $1 Billion USD of sales in 85 seconds. The introduction of new geographies only amplifies the need for robust online retail infrastructure and a focused eCommerce rollout. As more companies make this shift, Scalefast is poised to successfully lead rising brands, as well as established ones, through this critical transition in the life of their business.
