Lightspeed’s ecosystem is changing how retailers and suppliers do business. Our President, JP Chauvet, explains how the recent acquisitions of NuORDER and Ecwid (expected to close in the coming months as of this writing) have accelerated our product roadmap and created a clear path for us to achieve our long-term vision.
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Transcript
Gus: Welcome to Inside Lightspeed, the podcast that takes you inside the one-stop commerce platform used by merchants around the world to simplify, scale and provide exceptional customer experiences. This podcast may include forward-looking statements that are based on assumptions and therefore subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. We undertake no obligation to update these statements except as required by law. You can read about these risks and uncertainties in our filings with US and Canadian securities regulators. Our commentary today may include adjusted financial measures, which are non IFRS measures. I’m Gus Papageorgiou, Lightspeed’s Head of Investor Relations, and today I’m speaking to Jean Paul Chauvet, Lightspeed’s President. So let’s jump right in. Welcome, JP.
JP: Thank you, Gus. I’m very excited to be here.
Gus: Great. Now, JP, I know a lot of our investors have already met you and spoken to you personally. But before we get into the content of our podcast here, maybe you can just tell everybody a little bit of background about yourself and your time here at Lightspeed.
JP: Yeah, of course. So my background, my first job, was actually product manager. And I realized very quickly I needed to interact with people to be happy. But if you look at all of my career, I’ve basically been working with startups in the technology field and growing them. And I’ve done very early stage, I’ve done growth. And of course, my last venture for the last ten years has been Lightspeed. And I started Lightspeed as a CRO, so in charge of revenues. And over time I took more and more responsibilities. And today I’m now President of Lightspeed, really focusing on aligning product and go-to-market and focusing on also integrating all these businesses that we’ve acquired and generating a growth engine.
Gus: So you mentioned integration. I think, you know, when I talk to investors, that’s a topic that comes up a lot. We’ve done quite a few acquisitions here in the last year. And so there’s always the concern of, have we done too much? How do we integrate them? Just before you touch on that topic, I’ve noticed that the companies that we have acquired, like ShopKeep and Upserve, they all have the same technology approach as we do. So they’re all cloud based. They all have the same go-to-market strategy as we do. You know, it’s all centralized sales and marketing with inbound and they all measure the same things that we measure, like CAC, LTV, monthly retention rates, churn, ARPU. So it seems to me that the integration of these companies has been pretty seamless because we’re all, everybody, seems to be on the same page. Would you not agree?
JP: Yeah, well, look, I think, first of all, before we acquire companies, we want to ensure that there’s a really good fit with Lightspeed. So these are not, you know, overnight acquisitions. We know the companies, we see them progress, and we certainly know the companies in our industry that we like and those that we don’t. So I think from the get-go, when we acquire a company, we ensure that culturally it’s the right fit for Lightspeed and that there are a lot of synergies and a lot of upside from these integrations. So historically, we’ve done a lot. So I think the DNA of Lightspeed is very much the DNA of a company that knows how to acquire and how to integrate. And so I think, yes, you’re right. And even before Lightspeed, actually, that was a lot of my DNA was doing acquisitions because every company I worked for, we mainly acquired. And I think over time you learn, you develop a blueprint, you know how to integrate. So I think these have been very good. They’ve been very positive for Lightspeed. And also the last trick when we integrate these businesses, is we normally integrate the leadership and we try and give a very big role to the leadership of the companies that we acquire so that culturally, you know, we are constantly evolving. And this ensures that the integrations are really seamless and they create a ton of value.
Gus: Most of our target companies, these are companies you’ve known for a long time. It’s not like they’re new to you or new to the industry, right?
JP: Yeah. And I think that’s the key for success. Acquiring companies is a bit like a marriage. Not to sound cheesy, but you need to know exactly what you’re heading into. And I think the only way you know that is, is actually by evolving a relationship before you acquire the business with the founders, the CEOs and the leadership, so that once the deal is done, you know exactly what you’re heading into.
Gus: You know, if we look at the last two, like NuORDER and Ecwid, and Ecwid still has to close, slightly different approach. I mean, the first, if you look at ShopKeep, Upserve, Vend, that was really kind of to increase our geographical footprint, increase scale. NuORDER and Ecwid are more technology-focused acquisitions. I think the integration there should be a little easier because what we’re doing is basically taking that technology and integrating it into our platform.
JP: Yeah, the last two, you’re absolutely correct, are expanding our capabilities and actually not even expanding, I would say accelerating our capabilities. So if you look at NuORDER, we had a strategy which was to work upstream with suppliers and we had developed over a few years some capabilities there. But there was so much demand from our suppliers that the question we had to ask ourselves is do we put more resources and we take, you know, two, three, four years to get to the solution that’s actually needed versus NuORDER, which pretty much has out of the box everything we need. For us, the net result is overnight. We can now go to our customers. We can now go to our suppliers with a solution that is much better fitted for their needs. And that really helped us accelerate our roadmaps by at least five years.
Gus: And it’s not just the technology, the fact that they had three thousand brands, most of which were apparel and footwear, I mean, for us to onboard three thousand brands would have taken us years, right?
JP: Absolutely. So I think that it’s always the same thing. There’s a mix of know-how, there’s a mix of technology and then there’s customers. And of course, NuORDER comes with three thousand brands that are in the apparel space, which is a very big space for Lightspeed. So you’re absolutely right. It brings a lot of technology for existing customers, but it also brings a lot of new customers to Lightspeed and a lot of new partners to work with and to accelerate growth. But I think ultimately what I’m trying to say is the acquisition of a NuORDER really just enables us to do way more overnight versus spending the next five years trying to develop the skills and the know how. And at the same time, Ecwid is also an acceleration of capabilities. What we’ve all learned through Covid and the pandemic is that commerce is not what we thought it would be. And, you know, in the early days of commerce, everybody thought that commerce was about bringing people to an e-Commerce site and selling on that website when what we’ve understood now and what we’ve learned from looking at the behaviors is that commerce needs to be everywhere. It needs to be embedded in social media, needs to be embedded in a ton of applications. And all of this to say that Ecwid is a true headless commerce engine and for Lightspeed to redevelop our capabilities into being that platform would have taken us, again, years. It was on our roadmaps and here—great opportunity. And actually the meaning of Ecwid comes from e-commerce widget, and that’s really because it’s built from the ground up to be completely embedded. So I think for us here, it gives us incredible capabilities in e-commerce and it accelerates our capabilities for customers. And at the same time, as you said for NuORDER, Ecwid comes also with a number of customers that are a great opportunity to integrate into the Lightspeed ecosystem.
Gus: I mean Ecwid, in my mind too, provides us with a great deal of agility, because today social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram are popular. But tomorrow demand might shift to TikTok or some other platform. And I think Ecwid really lends itself to being able to integrate into whatever media platform is popular at the time, right?
JP: Yes, and nobody knows what the future is built of. But I think the beauty of Ecwid, it’s a set of APIs that are completely embeddable anywhere. I think a good example I could give you is the platform Wix. E-commerce from Wix comes from Ecwid. And it’s so embeddable that from a user’s perspective, it looks like it’s a completely Wix-developed product. But the reality is it’s an embedded application that comes from Ecwid. And I think in a word that summarizes what you were saying is: who knows what the next platform will be? But one certainty, it has to be completely transparent for the consumer and we need to have the capabilities to embed these platforms in a very easy way without having to completely redevelop every time.
Gus: The one thing that I don’t think a lot of our investors quite grasp yet is what we’re trying to stitch together from the supplier to the retail or restaurant to the consumer. We have hundreds of thousands of points of sales. We’re going to have a very good view on what’s happening with our customer base, but also the underlying economy. Like we will know what is selling. We will know who is selling it. We will know what prices are being sold at. We will know what’s in inventory. We may one day know who’s actually buying specific products. So with all that, I mean, Lightspeed really is becoming a massive data play.
JP: Yeah, I think it’s always been a data play. But I think now when you look at the expansion and you look at actually the penetration we have in certain verticals, we are becoming de facto one of the largest vendors with the largest set of aggregate data. And I think the beauty that we’re putting together when you look at what we’re triangulating, we’re triangulating supplier data with anything related to store data and sell through and discounts and whatever, attach rates and baskets. And we’re also triangulating this with consumers. And so I think when you look at the world and what happened in our space, which is, you know, retailers and restaurateurs, we came from a world of everything disconnected and, you know, POSes and commerce engines that were on premise with proprietary systems and proprietary data. And now we’re going to a world where everything is online, everything is visible. And the beauty of Lightspeed is we normalize all the data, so there is tremendous value in this. And I think over time what we’re going to be doing is developing more platforms that are based on this data to create more value within the ecosystem of Lightspeed. And I think today, with a hundred and fifty thousand customers plus and growing, this is arguably one of the largest set of data you can find in any kind of retail or restaurant space.
Gus: It’s a set of data that has use for so many participants on that platform. Suppliers, for example. I mean, the fact that they are going to be able to see the sell through data of their products from hundreds of thousands of SMBs. I mean, that will really help them optimize their production, optimize inventory levels. I mean, it’s a very valuable source of data stream for these brands, right?
JP: Absolutely. And I think the most important thing for brands is really control of the quality and the experience and ensuring that your goods doesn’t end up at the wrong price with the wrong audience. And I think here what we enable brands to do is: one, we enable them to see the sell through and not just see what has been ordered and might be on the shelf somewhere, but to really see what has reached the customer and what value that has created to the customer. I think the other big advantage with Lightspeed and the normalization of data is I can inform brands or I can expand distribution networks for brands, which means we can tell them: here are a hundred stores that you are not working with, that we know when we look at the demographics and we look at their consumers, we know they would sell your brand well. So I mean, what Lightspeed now represents for brands, and especially with the context of NuORDER and all these very high luxury brands, we can help them now control distribution, but also expand distribution. And really with the consumers, we can feed back to the brands, all of the consumer data on an aggregate level. And so they can gain a much better understanding of what their customers are actually buying and what they want to buy from the brands. And so, easy example is, we can actually influence trends. We can actually feed back trends to the brands and say, certain patterns of materials sell much better this year than last year. So there’s just so much data we can use for the brands. And that’s the beauty of what we’re putting together. We’re really putting together the real network effects within the verticals where we operate, where we have a real triangulation between the brand, the store and the consumer. And everybody gains from this. And this is why we’re so excited about this.
Gus: And even for the stores, too. I mean, the one thing I was thinking is, if we can see on a macro level that certain products are selling, we can go to the retailers and say: look, product A seems to be selling quite strongly. You have quite a few left in inventory. You might want to think about increasing the price, right? Because this product seems to be hot. Like, we can provide that kind of data feed and optimize prices for the retailers.
JP: Absolutely. We can enable, actually, retailers, and we’re thinking of a lot of models here but, you know, just think about a green, orange, red. When they’re putting the pricing or when they’re establishing the pricing within the platform, we’ll enable them to put the right price. But I think, really what’s exciting for a retailer is, imagine a retailer logging into our platform in the morning. And what we’ll tell them is: here are five brands you should order that we know will sell within your verticals and here we’re really enabling them and actually proposing the opposite and saying, here are five SKUs that you hold in inventory that are dusty and we know other stores would want to purchase them. So you’re going to sell them to this other store. So really putting in place kind of typical merchandising rules of large retail stores—we can apply this to SMBs and make them more successful ultimately.
Gus: And I think by providing this kind of macro level view of what is selling, what isn’t selling, where, it’s more likely that we’ll be able to help industries put products in stores that consumers want to buy so that they’re less likely to pursue options online, right? That consumers can feel more confident that, you know, I can go into a store and I know what I want to buy is going to be on the shelves.
JP: Absolutely. So we will curate the experience in store by enabling the store owner to know exactly what their audience wants to buy. And I think that’s what’s exciting. The other piece that I think is very useful is we can grab a little bit of the purchase history to inform the store. So we could probably inform the store of what size, you know, this individual is, of what size of shirts they wear, what are the patterns that they like, what are the brands that they like? So that the experience can be much better for a consumer when they go to the store versus just buying online from one of the big marketplaces. And I think that’s the beauty of this is, as I said, is—everybody wins. If I’m a consumer, I have an amazing experience. If I’m a brand, I have full control, I can expand my capabilities. And if I’m a store owner, I’m really going to let the store owner know how they should run their business to be successful and what they should replenish and what they should have in stock. And I’ll also enable them to sell inventory that is not selling through their customers to stores who have those interests.
Gus: The other topic I want to hit on is verticalization. I know we’ve talked about this in the past. I mean, this is very important for us. We want to become indispensable in the verticals where we are focused. So here, let’s just use the bike vertical as an example. You know, you’ve mentioned that the LTV to CAC ratio for us in bikes is significantly higher than our corporate average. And as a result of several factors, right? Bike shops use more of our stack. They’re more likely to use payments. The CAC is lower. And because of these benefits, we see just a higher LTV to CAC. I mean, so let’s kind of go through this. Why is the CAC in bikes lower than the average, and how can we expand this to other verticals?
JP: Yeah. So I think maybe just before we talk about the bikes CAC, you’re absolutely right. The way we become extremely successful is by going into verticals and owning a significant market share of verticals, because once you have enough, I call it concentration, and that means you have enough stores so you have enough distribution. From that moment, you will have the ear of the suppliers who are going to want to use you. And I think ultimately the supplier is going to want to work with us because we provide them with sell-through, which is data that they need to adjust manufacturing. So going back to your question on bikes, why is CAC so low in bikes? CAC is low in bikes because nobody at Lightspeed needs to sell inside the bike industry. Everybody within the ecosystem is selling Lightspeed. So if I’m a supplier, so let’s give a few names, so if I’m Giant or if I’m Specialized, who are the two largest suppliers in the bike industry, they are now forcing their network. So that means they’re forcing any store who wants to buy from them to be on a Lightspeed commerce platform. And the question is why? Well, they’re doing this because they can only see sell-through with Lightspeed. And so for them, this is significant because what would happen before Lightspeed is that a bike [store] would not know exactly what was sold. They would receive orders every quarter at the replenishing, but they didn’t know between those order points what was happening. And now we enable them to see what is exactly selling so that they can adjust in real time manufacturing.
And this is transformational for them because they always end up having enough supplies of what’s selling. And so, because that is so important to them and that sell-through is so important to them, they are now forcing the network for Lightspeed. And so this is very exciting because I think there’s value for the suppliers. And the stores love Lightspeed within the bike industry because they don’t have to restock in any of the catalogues or any of the parts or order outside. We have a fully integrated ordering process. So that means if I’m a bike store and I’m, you know, I’m going low in supplies, I can now directly order from Lightspeed. And this goes directly to suppliers and gets shipped. So, again, obviously the consumers gain from this because everything they’re looking for is always available in store. So if you take this model and you try and apply it to, you know, I don’t know, electronics, golf, pets, jewelry, furniture, toys, luxury goods, apparel, like what we’re doing with NuORDER, it’s very exciting because then once that ecosystem is in place, CAC is going to go down because we don’t have to sell anymore. The suppliers are going to force the network because they want to see the sell-through. And that’s the beauty of this connected world we’re trying to build within the verticals that matter for Lightspeed.
Gus: And then obviously the second part of the equation is LTV. But because we do have the integration into the suppliers, they’re more likely to use more of the stack, right? So as, you know, the system becomes more useful to you as a store owner, the relationship is more trusted. You’re more likely to adopt Payments. You’re more likely to perhaps pursue Capital from Lightspeed. So we see an increased use of the platform from these verticals.
JP: Absolutely. But I think the first fundamental rule is they’re going to be more successful with Lightspeed within that vertical because of the integration. So that means just de facto LTV is going to go up because failure rates are going to go down. So I’ll give you a few examples. If I have fully integrated catalogues and I could just click a button and sell online and using exactly the same inventory without having to rekey anything on Shopify or a third party e-Commerce engine, well, why would you do that? So that means, again, it’s very sticky and the beauty of the integration between the parts make it very sticky. The second example, of course, is Payments. As soon as you use Lightspeed Payments, you can have a fully integrated view of what’s sold and what hits your bank account. So we do more. But also, as soon as you use Lightspeed Payments, we will be giving you Capital that we will then withhold as people buy the goods. But so here again, more value. You know, you don’t have to go to the bank. You don’t have to negotiate a loan. Here at Lightspeed, the platform is going to tell you: hey, click here and you can get your money. So again, another good way to expand. And I think finally when we’re talking about Loyalty, and it’s a big piece also of our customers, is understanding how to use points and Loyalty and rewards, et cetera. Well, here having a fully integrated Loyalty platform that works with your e-commerce and works offline and enables the triangulation of the consumer piece between suppliers and stores—very useful for the store owner again. So I think ultimately over time, they’ll buy more from us, they’ll be more successful. And that’s why CAC goes down, and LTV goes up.
Gus: And churn will decrease because, again, we should be able to help them become more successful.
JP: Absolutely. Because we’ll help them understand, you know, what sells in their demographics, what are the new goods they should replenish. What are the trends? We basically own information nobody else has. And now we need to make it available on a macro level to our customers so that they can be more successful.
Gus: The other topic I wanted to hit on is, and you mentioned earlier in our discussion is that high speed network as a distribution center, right? We’ve stitched together what I think is a very compelling commerce platform. Obviously, we have to look for several ways to monetize this and we’ll continue to offer our SaaS offering and with NuORDER we’ll extend to suppliers and retailers in hospitality and Payments, obviously should be a strong area for us. But given this vast network of retailers and restaurants, combined with the data insights, we’ll be looking for potentially new revenue models. And the one that you’ve been talking about in the past is this Lightspeed as a distribution network. Can we talk a little bit about that and kind of the monetization opportunities we see there?
JP: Yeah, I think there’s a few things in mind when we think about the future and we think about distribution. The first one is: ultimately, because I know exactly what’s selling in the network on a monthly and quarterly and annualized basis and actually on a daily basis, I know what goods need to be replenished and what goods need to be bought. And here, unfortunately, every store, when you’re an SMB, your buying power is much lower if you’re buying individually versus if you’re doing an aggregate buying. So I think one of the things we’re thinking of is: can I do aggregate discounts for the Lightspeed network? And that means instead of having every store individually negotiate the buy price at a much higher cost, I could probably, given the volumes that go through our network, buy the goods at a much lower cost and then enable the network to access this privileged pricing—which will enable then the stores to compete against the Amazons of the world because they’re using the same strategy, which is bulk buying at a much lower cost. So I think that’s the first thing we’re thinking of. As soon as we go deeper into verticals, we need to work with suppliers and we need to buy goods.
Gus: And our data set gives us confidence in the inventory that we’re buying because we’ll be able to see what is selling. So it reduces the risk.
JP: That’s why, in that case, it’s no dissimilar to an Amazon or, you know, we have huge volumes that are selling through the network and we know we can make very safe bets on what we want to buy, at what price. And again, the view for Lightspeed is to enable the store to land the goods at a much lower cost than what they’re currently doing. So that’s the first thought process when we think about distribution. The next thought process is: I can tell within Lightspeed what brands would sell, within what areas, within what stores. And it kind of models like Fair or, you know, these are models where instead of saying, “I’m going to sell the goods”, these are models where I’m going to say, “You know what? I’m going to enable a store to sell those goods and I’m going to take a distribution fee.” And if you look at companies like Fair who take 25% of the first order, when they expand the network they take 15% on follow on orders. So here with Lightspeed, very easily, when I look at similarities of inventory and I look at the outliers in certain stores, I can very easily identify how these outliers could sell in other countries, in other regions.
And I can now go and see those brands and say, you know what, here are 100 stores that you’re not working with today that I’m going to introduce you to, so that the stores can order. I can actually even use Lightspeed Capital to fund the stores to order from that. So when you start aggregating all of that profitability and you think about Lightspeed Capital and then you think about how they’re going to buy with Lightspeed Payments and then we’re going to make a transaction fee on that. And then you think about distribution and how I’m going to be paid from the supplier side and you start aggregating all this data. There’s a lot of money and I think we can really expand the ARPU, but I think ultimately we’ll do it in a way that benefits everybody. Benefits the suppliers because they’re expanding their networks and benefits the stores, because we’re enabling them to access Capital and to access supplies that they’re not currently looking at and that we know will sell within their stores.
Gus: Yeah, and I think that what has a lot of people are excited internally is our ability then to capitalize on the GTV that passes through the network increases substantially, right? So, you know, right now, if we look at a retailer, we’ll get the software and we’ll get the Payments. But in this distribution model that you’re talking about, and this is a purely hypothetical example, so let’s say we introduce a new supplier to a store and they order $1000 worth of inventory. Now, if we insert ourselves into the financing, we’re pretty confident this inventory will sell and the supplier says, well, if you pay up front, I’ll give it to you at list less 10%. So we advance the money to buy at list less 10. We sell to the retailer at list less five. We make $50 right there/ And then we get, if we introduced the supplier to the retailer, we get the 10% percent, right, 10% distribution fees. So there’s another $90 and now we’re at $140. If they pay, B2B, using Lightspeed Payments, we’ll clear roughly another $6 there. So now we’re at $146 and then they mark it up, say 50% and then they sell it to the consumer using Lightspeed Payments, there’s another $10. So now we’re at $156 that we’ve monetized through that one order, through that one retailer. It really is several times higher than what we can do currently.
JP: Yeah. That’s why I think we’re so excited about this. The expansion is incredible. There’s literally no limits. And I think that is the beauty of the data. And, you know, we talked about Lightspeed being a data play. From the moment you understand the data well, you can derive all these business models that benefit everyone or benefit everybody, I mean. That’s why we’re not too worried about expansion or ARPU, we know there’s a lot of growth there. And that’s why I think for us, going back to the first question, which were these two acquisitions, they’re very important—Ecwid and NuORDER—because they enable us to complete this vision. This is like, you know, case complete of what we’re trying to put in place. And it enables us to not just do bikes, but to really expand what we’re doing in bikes into many different verticals. And apparel, being a very big one for Lightspeed, we now have 3000 suppliers that are fully integrated. So what we have to do now is ensure that the experience for our customers is amazing, that we integrate those businesses well into Lightspeed and the platforms, and then we can just start going well and monetizing every single angle of the relationships.
Gus: And apparel really would be the toughest nut to crack, right? Because if you look at verticals like bike or pet or electronics, we’re talking about a fairly concentrated list of suppliers. There’s not thousands of them, there are a few dozen that really matter. And so it’s easy to get them onto the network. But in apparel, again, there’s so many apparel brands that it would have taken us years to really get scale of suppliers onto the platform. And that’s something that, again, NuORDER has done for us virtually overnight.
JP: You’re 100% right. The apparel list of suppliers is a long tail list. But I think the beauty, going back to what they’ve built, is all of these brands also need a commerce engine for their stores. They need a commerce engine for their distribution network. So I think that’s why it’s kind of a win win for everyone. We now, with NuORDER, we have this ability. I mean, they come with about 100,000 locations of small stores that are ordering in their platform. And these are typical Lightspeed customers. They come with 3,000 brands that are typical Lightspeed customers that could be using our platform within the stores and selling online. So I think, again, a lot of upside, a lot of synergies between these two businesses.
Gus: So, JP, if we look out ten years from now, obviously there’s still a lot of execution, we have a lot of hard work, a lot of heavy lifting ahead of us, and everybody’s got their head down and working hard. But if we look out ten years at what the company is going to look like, I mean, I think financial services are safe to say it will be a much bigger portion of our revenue stream, correct?
JP: Absolutely. You know, I always say this, but, you know, we have more data than the bank. And if we execute our plans well and we go deep into the verticals, I mean, we will own data that nobody else has. And that means we’ll be in a better position than anybody to do all types of financial services within the ecosystem. So that’s really very exciting. And so I think that’s why if I project ten years from now, I probably see Lightspeed becoming a dominant player within the verticals we’ve identified. Probably everybody within the ecosystem will gain from working with us. And at the core of this, you’ll have a data play and a financial services play that basically provides a ton of value to everybody.
Gus: And the B2B side will also be much more important, right? Right now we’re very much B2C, but with supplier, the B2B aspect will become much more important for us, I think.
JP: Absolutely. I’m almost 100% certain that in ten years from now the suppliers will see us as the largest distribution network within the vertical. So even a new supplier who wants to launch a good within one of the verticals where we operate, we will be, you know, we will be the best way for them to reach the audience ultimately. So, again, I think there’s going to be a ton of opportunity there. And you’re right, ultimately we’ll have two customers. We’ll have the stores and the store owners, which is our historical. But we also have all of the suppliers, and I think we might also be providing industry data and selling macro level industry data, because there’s a lot of companies, you know, in those verticals that are doing this and aren’t doing as well as we’ll be doing and won’t have the aggregate data we’ll have.
Gus: We have real time data.
JP: Absolutely. And we can go much, much more granular than what is a market share per state. We can actually say what is the average basket size, what is the basket composed? What are the brands that are often found in the same basket? So I think it’ll be used also even for the suppliers, for M&A, for product development. I mean, it’s just so exciting when you look at the opportunities we have ahead. There’s so much we could do. And that’s why I think we’re just scratching the surface. But at the core, we own data nobody else has, and we’re going to provide a ton of value within the verticals where we operate.
Gus: Okay, so we’ve got the B2C side, we’ve got the B2B side. Do we think we can extend somehow to the consumer directly at some point?
JP: Well, I think we will be working with consumers because ultimately, we talked about curating the experience for a consumer going to one of our stores. And I think you can probably expect also to have, probably, portals or marketplaces within the verticals where we operate. And I’ll give you a good example. We have arguably the largest set of glasses to view the inventory of bikes in the US. It makes no sense for us not to say, well, why wouldn’t we have a portal for a consumer who wants to buy a bike and enable them to access the largest repository of all bikes in the US? So I think we will do that. We will do that as a value add to the stores because we want to enable them to sell and reach more audiences. But I do think Lightspeed will be a brand that will be recognized by consumers within the verticals where we operate.
Gus: But it will be a portal supporting local merchants. So, for example, like I live in Toronto, I want to buy a certain Da Vinci bike. I could go into a Lightspeed portal and say, okay, this is the bike I’m looking for. And it could bring up for me, these are the stores that are near you that carry this bike.
JP: Absolutely. But we could also say, do you want to buy it? From what store? Do you want to reserve it and pick it up in store? So we are going to put omnichannel models for the consumer. And I think also we will probably have—and this is, you know, maybe a bit of a reach—but I think we’ll probably have now that we’re, you know, talking about this, we’ll probably have a loyalty program ten years from now across stores within bikes that enables a consumer to go from one store to the next, that is on Lightspeed, and have the rewards and redeem the rewards. And we’ll also have probably one login across all of the locations that are using Lightspeed. So that, again, just focusing on the experience of the consumer to be sure that it’s curated and it’s the best experience you can find.
Gus: So there’s no shortage of what’s on your to do list over the next five years.
JP: I think we’re an ambitious bunch and we are in one of the largest markets and the market needs a lot of change and so we want to be the agent of change and we want to, of course, become one of the largest players in the industry.
Gus: Great. Okay, I think we’ll wrap it up with that. JP, always a pleasure speaking to you. Thank you for spending the time with us today. And thanks everybody for joining us.
JP: Thank you very much, Gus.
Gus: Thank you for listening to Inside Lightspeed. If you aren’t already, be sure to follow Lightspeed on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Our handle is Lightspeed HQ. Original music for the episode was composed by Timothy LeClaire. The episode was edited by Jonathan Beaton and produced by Lightspeed. See you next time.
