Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: TrueCommerce CEO, Ross Elliott (Part 1)

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: TrueCommerce CEO, Ross Elliott (Part 1)

Published on Monday, Jul 16th 2018

Very intriguing interview on how B2B e-commerce is developing both disintermediation and empowering of intermediaries to be more effective.Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by presenting our audience to yourself and Unified Commerce.Ross Elliott: I am one of the founders and President of a company called TrueCommerce. We are a hundred-million dollar service provider of B2B commerce and B2C commerce. We’re headquartered in Cranberry, Pennsylvania, which is a suburban area of Pittsburgh.Sramana Mitra: When you say B2B commerce and B2C commerce, tell us a bit more about what specifically is your business.Ross Elliott: We began the business about 12 years ago with the idea that connection was going to end up becoming the leading sign of success in the supply chain throughout time. Our centerpiece in building this company was to construct out a healthy network internationally that provided connectivity into a variety of different kinds of companies, mainly buyers and sellers.A buyer could be you, or I as a customer. A purchaser might be a maker, or it might be merchants or suppliers buying material that may be pushed to a customer like us. A seller, on the converse, might be a retailer

, maker, or grower. We wanted to build a network to provide the electronic connectivity between all of those members of the supply chain. Among the methods of doing that was to use a standard approach called EDI.We begun by buying up a variety of EDI companies to offer us the beginning point for that any-to-any network. We’ve broadened upon it. When we discuss B2C or B2B, we’re really stating network in the center that is accountable for moving transactions around,

verifying info, and then a series of services and applications that surround the network.Those might be things like a web shop for specific companies to present their organisation. It could be item information management for a maker attempting to get abundant content from their circulation channel. It might be integrations in the marketplaces

like Amazon and eBay. For all intents and functions, what we desire to do is help with the circulation of details between the buyers and the sellers and provide applications to add value to that information at its endpoint.Sramana Mitra: How did you construct the network? Where did you start? Did you begin with business and provided them the platform through which to bring all their suppliers in, and is that how the network got seeded?Ross Elliott: I want it were that easy. We in fact started at the other end of the marketplace. We primarily began with small-to-mid market customers. We have actually got about 12,000 direct paying clients and about 92,000 overall connections into the network. Our beginning area was to go to the smaller sized business that didn’t have either the monetary wherewithal or technical proficiency on the best ways to build

communication relate to the people that either wished to purchase their products or they desired to purchase from.Our largest single community on the network are QuickBooks consumers. We have whatever. from QuickBooks customers at the really low end to enterprise companies that might been the several billions of dollars at the high end.Sramana Mitra: You began with the low end of sellers, and then generated the larger purchasers later.Ross Elliott: That is absolutely a real declaration. We started with the provider communities then generated the retail community later in

life.