Profile: Joe white, Moonfruit

Hosting websites since 1999, Moonfruit has developed over the years to cater for small ecommerce businesses creating simple, user friendly sites. It was acquired by Yell (now Hibu) last year and continues to innovate as part of the Hibu company.

I caught up with co-founder Joe White to find out more about surviving the dotcom crash, the £23m buy-out and the future of ecommerce.

So Joe what was the space like when you first launched Moonfruit back in 1999?

When we started we were very much an original dot com. Our purpose was to allow people to share their passions online and remove the barrier of technology and allow them to be part of the internet revolution without knowing how to code.

At that time the norm for companies was  to raise as much venture capital as possible, give your product away for free and build a large customer base.

We had to work hard to attract people because not everyone was online so we has these weird TV ads running around 2000 trying to persuade people to go onto the internet. Ecommerce at the time was tiny it was all about going online and browsing.

We had lots of investment and a huge marketing strategy but zero income – there was certainly a problem brewing and when the crash came it was clear that w couldn’t achieve the revenues we needed. We had to scale back from 65 staff to ten and then eventually to two – Wendy (Tan White) and Eirik (Pettersen) my co-founders.

I went off to work for McKinsey. Moonfruit moved to a subscription model and we were saved by our customers – what we offered was valuable to people even when the internet was still a balance between business and hobby.

I came back in 2004 and Wendy, by then my wife, left to have our children and do a post graduate course in design at St Martins. Our user base grew steadily, enabling people to participate online. Wendy came back in 2009 compounding our emphasis on good design. She re-injected some of that founders energy and started using social media to drive customer growth.

You were acquired by Hibu last year, why do you think they wanted to move into this space?

We were trying to expand into the US market and a lot of the conversations we were having were ending up with acquisition talk. We had a number of people interested but we felt that Hibu was an interesting chose because of their turnaround story. They are trying to reinvigorate a huge print-based business with millions of global customers.

They were interested in us because historically the route to market for small businesses was the big yellow book which arrived on doorsteps. The internet changed that and more and more people switched to online searches. Now this route has come down to having a presence online which is what we facilitate. The tools of the trade have radically changed and they needed to evolve and we are a great fit for that.

When did you add an ecommerce offering to the platform?

We had a shop element a  few years ago but it wasn’t very sophisticated. PayPal approached us and said they noticed we had a high volume of small business customers and they wanted to work with is redeveloping our ecommerce tools.

We set about building something quite contemporary. We knew we wanted something quite light, easy to use and accessible to small businesses who maybe didn’t want to venture into using the more complex and expensive platforms as they’d find them intimidating.

This was in late 2010 and we recognised that any shop service had to be mobile and socially optimised. This gave us an advantage because most ecommerce software had to develop special bolt-ons for this but we built with these functions in mind.

The idea is that you can publish once and sell everywhere. If you update the data is will render across all of the platforms including mobile and Facebook – you can use the same tool. Small businesses don’t have time to maintain these separately.

At the beginning of 2011 we launched with PayPal and Start-Up Britain as partners. We’ve also spoken with Amazon about marketplaces. Ultimately retailers should be able to publish once and sell across everywhere – marketplaces included. We have designed our product with these things in mind.

Have you noticed any great changes in ecommerce since launching your shop platform?

Well it has been really successful – we’ve had half a million shops built in the 14 months since launch. When we first launched we looked at where the transactions where being made. We saw 2% through Facebook, £% on mobile and 2% on tablets – the rest on laptops and desktops.

We have looked at the figures again recently and we’ve seen no change in Facebook – which shows that social commerce hasn’t taken off as quickly as people thought it would. We’ve seen 5% on mobile which is a small increase. The biggest change has been in tablet – it now makes up 10% of transactions. The domination of desktops has been reduced. 2012 really was the year of the tablet.

How do you think mcommerce, especially mobile payments, will effect ecommerce in the next few years?

Mobile payments are hugely important for small businesses and they will need to integrate this into their set-ups. You need to be able to allow your customers to transact in as many ways as possible. Either through a site, mobile, physical store – you need to evolve. This is only going to increase.

Do you think the high street and ecommerce can both have a place in the future of retail?

I think they do. It is down to how store owners evolve. I’ve seen store managers in small shops sitting behind their tills on their laptops managing the online store. The physical store needs to be a manifestation of the online catalogue. People will look in-store and if you don’t have those products available to purchase online they might go and buy elsewhere.

Also retailers should be making people aware of their online stores in their physical shops. If someone is looking at something in store there should be a call to action to perhaps buy online and get a discount.

Is there a retailer in the UK that you think is doing this particularly well?

I think All Saints do a really good job. Its ecommerce and mobile sites are very professional and show the products really well. They also have their iPads in-store and web kiosks – so it feels fully integrated. They really don’t care if you buy online or in-store and the shop assistants will assist you in buying online if needs be.

How do you think Moonfruit will develop?

We will continue to roll out more services and facilitate publishing across more platforms. We will never try and create a full enterprise option – we are aiming at micro traders who have been poorly served in terms of ecommerce tools. The opportunities have always gone to the big players as they have the capital to be early adopter.

Statistics have shown that independent store have chipped away at Amazon’s domination online which shows that ecommerce is becoming more accessible and social commerce will start to lower the cost for businesses as well. It just comes down to how well retailers and small businesses can adapt to the concept of new platforms. If they to adapt they will be successful bit if not they will struggle.

For more, check out Moonfruit.com