Meet Paul Fischbein

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Paul Fischbein founded his first e-commerce venture at the turn of the millennium. Since then, he has worked with, and invested in, with numerous business in the sector, not only other retailers, such as RevolutionRace, but also logistic through companies like Budbee and Instabox and the price comparison site Pricerunner. Currently he is the CEO of RevolutionRace as well as Board member of Network of Design.

What brought you into the world of e-commerce?

I’ve always felt that online commerce is the future, even at the times when there was no reasonable way to pay online or when logistics was much more of an issue. In 2002 I saw what Amazon and NetOnNet in Sweden was doing, and I realized this was what I wanted to do. After extensive research I started selling appliances online founding Tretti.se along the way.

What was the key to the success you had with Tretti.se?

Shopping online isn’t only about making the purchase itself simpler. You want to make the whole process simple for the customer. A central point when building Tretti.se was to make the logistics and installations of appliances easy. If you bought a new washing machine we delivered it to your home, carried it up the stairs and installed it – taking the old machine with us when we left. So, it was more than e-commerce it was also a new way to support customers.

What’s the most common mistake made when scaling an online commerce business?

Today it’s relatively easy to set up an e-com store in your garage, building a web-store and handling payment doing logistics yourself. But when you see good growth and want to take the business to the next level people often underestimate the amount of work and complexity needed in the process. If the logistics operations is under dimensioned, for example, one will most probably face challenges and find it hard to continue to grow and it will also be difficult to be profitable.

What’s an important aspect that often goes wrong?

If you sell products online, you cannot overestimate the importance of well-functioning logistics. Logistics isn’t only the way you make money, and the basis for most business models, it is also how the customers will judge you and your brand. And if logistics breaks down you will build up a backlog fast, risking a logistic-cardiac-arrest that threatens the entire business.