Local-Commerce Profile: Q&A With NimbleCommerce

This continues our series of profiles of local-commerce companies. The purpose of these Q&A profiles is to give merchants, marketers and others in the industry a look at what some deal platforms out there are doing. These profiles are also meant to offer different perspectives on the future of the local-commerce industry.

This week we’re profiling NimbleCommerce, an enterprise e-commerce and marketing platform that also has a marketplace for publishers, deal providers and merchants.

Prashant Nedungadi, founder and CEO of NimbleCommerce, was kind enough to take some time to answer our questions. Read on to find out how the company got its name, what it thinks of the attention Groupon has received and what needs to change in the industry.

Please introduce yourself.
I am the founder and CEO of NimbleCommerce. I have over 21 years in the technology industry and over 13 years in the e-commerce and online shopping space. Prior to NimbleCommerce, I was the co-founder and CTO at Andale, the largest third-party e-commerce platform for small businesses who sold on eBay, Amazon Marketplace, Overstock and other marketplaces. I did my B.S. in computer science at Indian Institute of Technology and my M.S. in electrical engineering at Stanford University.

Outside of work, I love to play golf, travel and spend time with my family. Once a week, I also teach advanced math at our local school.

How would you describe NimbleCommerce in one sentence?
NimbleCommerce provides a leading enterprise offers and promotions platform, and is the only company to offer the NimbleNetwork, which operates as a marketplace for publishers, deal suppliers and merchants to collectively find or promote offers, distribute them and share revenue.

OK, now describe your business without restrictions, in plain English to the everyday reader.
Let’s say you are a newspaper and your business is suffering because of falling advertising rates, and you decide to make money selling offers to your customers on your site. You have existing assets you bring to bear: a sales team, access to customers with money to spend. You just don’t know anything about e-commerce. That’s where NimbleCommerce comes in.

Your sales team can then, for example, approach a chain of beauty salons, get an offer and sell that offer directly to target customers on your newspaper site. If you don’t have deals to sell, no problem: use the NimbleNetwork that has deals ready to go.

The newspaper wins because they have created a new revenue stream and stopped readers from clicking off of their site. Readers win because they get access to deals from a brand they trust. And local merchants win because they get a steady stream of new customers without having to pay upfront. NimbleCommerce also wins because we charge a percentage of the sales as our fee, similar to Visa or MasterCard, because we facilitate the promotion, transaction and fulfillment of the offer.

Tell us about how the company got its start and how the name was chosen.
NimbleCommerce was conceived in the summer of 2009 after taking a hard look at Groupon’s model and realizing that any company with an audience can make money by providing e-commerce to its members or audience. We launched in February of 2010 and have been steadily growing ever since.

“NimbleCommerce” came from our head of sales and marketing, Kevin Wray. It’s a juxtaposition of two typically dissimilar words. “Nimble” is all about agility, speed of development, fast reaction times — and “commerce” is a steady, ubiquitous business term that connotes stability, strength and profits. Mash the two together and you get a very good description of the company: We are a rock-solid platform that processes hundreds of millions of dollars per year, but we serve a fast-moving market with flexibility and agility in the platform and with our rapid-development approach as a strategic advantage.

How does NimbleCommerce stand out from the crowd of local-commerce companies?
Many local-commerce operators are just scratching the surface of what’s possible in the space. It’s not enough to put up a Web page and stick on a “Buy” button. How do you engage customers, help them find the right deals for them, create loyalty and engagement? And how do you do this on a global scale?

NimbleCommerce is unique, and we pioneered the idea of creating a bi-directional marketplace that scales logarithmically, is growing rapidly and benefits everyone involved in the offers space. Those with offers can benefit from the distribution options in the NimbleNetwork. And those with good distribution and reach can benefit from the supply of deals in the network.

Couple the NimbleNetwork with our flexible and robust e-commerce platform and we can handle any commerce scenario thrown at us. We have customers with a single site that supports checkout in multiple currencies — all for the same deal, for example. This is not easy to do for many businesses, let alone your typical media company.

Because this is a fast-moving space, we stand out because we are the most advanced platform in the world and continue to innovate and deliver new experiences to our clients. Look at all the innovation happening in mobile with maps, geo-fenced offers, iOS Passbook, linking offers to credit cards, mobile discovery of offers — there are a lot of moving parts and new ways to buy and consume offers. We intend to remain at the forefront.

What has NimbleCommerce found to be the biggest misconception media companies and brands bring to the table when considering using your platform?
Some brands and media companies think that by flipping on a deal site, they will have Groupon-like success overnight.