A Q&A with Barilliance co-founder Ido Ariel. The Tel Aviv-based company was founded in 2008.
SUB: Please explain what Barilliance is, and the value proposition you bring to shopping.
Ariel: Barilliance is a one stop shop for ecommerce personalization solutions which enable our online retailing customers to increase their conversion rates by hundreds of percent by facilitating the use of personalization to reach out and close lost sales. In addition to our recently launched Facebook Fan Page Personalization solution, Barilliance’s eCommerce Personalization suite includes solutions for shopping cart abandonment, personalized product recommendations, email personalization, and onsite behavioral targeting.
SUB: Who do you consider to be your competition?
Ariel: Most companies we compete with offer only one of the products we offer in our suite. For example, SeeWhy offers a cart abandonment program. None of our competitors offer as comprehensive a suite of ecommerce personalization solutions as we offer at a price point accessible for any SMB.
SUB: What differentiates Barilliance from your competitors?
Ariel: What differentiates Barilliance from our competitors is: 1.) one time 5 minute setup for all of our products as opposed to the weeks it takes to implement other solutions; 2.) personalization products suite—we are the only company that offers cart abandonment, cross channel product recommendations and onsite behavioral targeting at reasonable prices—our competitors offer only one of these products; 3.) socially-aware offering—we leverage social data from Facebook, when users login on the retailer’s site, to show social recommendations from friends and also allow segmentation based on Facebook data—for example, we enable showing a special offer to a user who has an upcoming birthday.
SUB: What’s your business model? How does (or how will) Barilliance generate revenue?
Ariel: Barilliance provides a comprehensive suite of ecommerce personalization solutions on a SaaS basis where we charge a tiered monthly fee from our clients based on the solutions they use and usage volume. In addition, Barilliance is already profitable.
SUB: What was the inspiration behind the idea? Was there an “aha” moment, or was it longer in developing?
Ariel: The idea was an evolution of an initial ecommerce concept which we refined overtime after we started talking with customers.
SUB: When was Barilliance founded and what were the first steps you took toward establishing it?
Ariel: Barilliance was founded in 2008 when we began developing our suite of ecommerce personalization solutions. Our first offering was our web product recommendations solution.
SUB: What have the biggest obstacles been so far to building the business?
Ariel: Getting the first brand-name customers without having a local presence in multiple geographies. Since we are based in Israel, we had to target other countries because our local ecommerce market is small. We were able to secure large multichannel retailers in Europe without face-to-face meetings or a local office, and are progressing nicely in the U.S., too, with several Internet Retailer 500 retailers, but it took time and tenacity.
SUB: Do you plan to raise outside funding in the near future?
Ariel: There is no need for us to raise outside funding in the near future as we are already profitable, but we might do so at some point to accelerate our growth.
SUB: What are your goals for Barilliance over the next year or so?
Ariel: Our goal for the coming year is to double our customer base and revenue, while maintaining the level of support and customer satisfaction we currently have.
Barilliance – www.barilliance.com
