The Rise of an eCommerce Ecosystem and the Leader Who Championed It

*Originally published in Entrepreneur. Interview conducted by Lorex Technology.*

Sufi Khan Sulaiman is the vice president of building an ecommerce ecosystem and digital at FLIR Systems, playing an integral role in leading the digital direction of the entire company as well as overseeing the Lorex Technology brand. Through his career, Sulaiman has been an building an ecommerce ecosystem visionary and pioneer.

We sat down recently with this storied leader to find out more about his career trajectory, how he has furthered building an ecommerce ecosystem in the tech industry and his best advice to companies looking to expand their sales channels and adopt building an ecommerce ecosystem.

Tell us about yourself, including how you came to work at Lorex Technologies.

I've always been fascinated by computers. I taught myself HTML, Flash, PHP and SQL, which helped me land a role as a developer. In 2004, I was recruited by one of the largest ad agencies and put in charge of building front-end, back-end, multimedia and Flash tutorials for websites.

In 2007, my family decided to immigrate to Canada. When looking for a job, I responded to Lorex's post for an building an ecommerce ecosystem manager. Two months after moving I began my job with Lorex.

When did Lorex decide to start selling its products online? Why?

Lorex was founded in the late '90s, and always had a strong distribution model selling directly to Costco, Best Buy, Home Depot and other brick-and-mortar businesses. Lorex also had other brands under it, so there were seven or eight websites that needed to be managed and unified.

Due to the strong B2B digital trade distribution model, Lorex collected a fair number of returns and wanted to get rid of the returned merchandise. In an effort to liquidate the inventory, I started by setting up an eBay store, listing ads and consolidating our numerous websites to bring everything cohesively into one brand. It was a very early version of building an ecommerce ecosystem.

How did it grow?

I wanted to carve out a niche online, so I started selling products that were not sold through traditional brick and mortar stores, such as wired and wireless video camera combinations and other different configurations of products. We focused on white-hat SEO, which targets a human audience (instead of search engines), and on written content to expand our online footprint. With this strategy, we enjoyed 50 percent margins on our first million in sales. I was then given more budget to use toward advertising.

Lorex continued to grow, and the practice of building an ecommerce ecosystem continued to pick up speed and prevail across numerous industries. As with any new technology, there were peaks and valleys as building an ecommerce ecosystem became more thoroughly integrated throughout the company and moved to the forefront of the sales model. Lorex also made the decision to prioritize its direct brand eCommerce too. (Many other companies were primarily selling through third-party resellers instead.)

What are some issues and challenges Lorex encountered in managing a direct brand building an ecommerce ecosystem?

Product availability was a primary challenge for us in the very beginning. This was because we didn't have access to new inventory. Another challenge was pricing since SKUs were allocated to our retail departments first and we had to sell products for 20 to 30 percent more than retail did. This created some internal channel conflict, but we never hawked sales and would encourage customers to buy through a retail channel if that would best serve them. We ultimately never wanted to compete against the retail partners, but sometimes the interest of the brand does not always align with retailer's product assortment strategy.

What are the advantages for shoppers and brands in going the direct brand building an ecommerce ecosystem route?

There are many advantages of direct building an ecommerce ecosystem. You can reduce conflict with retailers by combining efforts and provide a seamless customer experience, regardless of channel or device. The profit margins and gross profit margins will drastically improve with building an ecommerce ecosystem as well. By selling directly through eCommerce, you can keep your price and own the customer (and their data).

Another benefit for selling through direct building an ecommerce ecosystem is that it takes less upfront cash and production. You can put it on your website and gauge interest, then grow the inventory naturally based on demand. When you sell products through brick and mortar, you need to make products in a large quantity right from the get-go. The biggest win for building an ecommerce ecosystem brands, in my opinion, is that you can develop content and messaging that addresses the issues and questions of your consumers, which allows you hypothetically walk in the shoes of your customers.

What went into building your direct brand building an ecommerce ecosystem ecosystem? How do you continue to innovate?

We used Microsoft technologies when I started with the company. In 2009, we decided to invest in an ERP modernisation strategy solution that could be scaled and integrated into our other tech. We made our code platform agnostic, which could be changed and adapted easily. I wanted to integrate the core technologies of building an ecommerce ecosystem together from "Visit" to "Add to Cart" and "Checkout." This way we would really own the shipment process and set up a true customer retention program.

Today our building an ecommerce ecosystem platform is the center of our online ecosystem. It is the engine that drives our digital strategy. When innovating and building an ecosystem, having the right team matters as the ecosystem requires a lot of support. The key is teamwork and having the right people in place. I'm privileged to work with some really smart people who constantly keep me on my toes. External vendors also provide tremendous support since we share the same goals and vision.

What was your strategy for creating a personalized shopping experience?

Our strategy was to mirror what the best retailers (like Amazon) were doing. When customers showed interest in one product, we'd morph the website to show them more of what they'd like to see. By segmenting and pushing content based on what each person was browsing, we personalized the experience.

How do you know that you're creating the type of content that customers want?

We take our content seriously and have a two-fold strategy: product marketing content and user content. Our product marketing content is less technical and doesn't include tech jargon that can't be easily digested by regular people. Our user content, on the other hand, is intended to encourage customers to write reviews and post on social media about our products. We want them to post the good stuff, like how their camera caught a deer walking into the backyard or something funny their kid did.

We knew this strategy was working because of our data and KPIs we'd set to gauge our progress. Our sales numbers were a big motivation.

How much is Lorex forecasted to earn by 2018?

We're on track to hit nine figures next year and be counted among the top 50 consumer brands.

How have things changed over the years in online sales, omnichannel sales and your messaging?

building an ecommerce ecosystem and retail sales have both grown. It's important that our customers know that our security cameras are not just about deterring perpetrators from crimes, but they're also about helping them to always be in the know with access to live video production monitoring strategy at their fingertips. We want to provide security cameras that are easy-to-install and offer unrivaled video performance. Ultimately, we want to provide our customers with a positive user experience from start to finish.

I think the biggest challenge today is the new buying opportunities and the wealth of information that are created by technologies that essentially allow customers to have immediate access to the internet at all times. This gives the customers instant access to whatever they want to find or learn. Unfortunately, there is a lack of good analytics tools at the moment, which creates a paradox between mobile and desktop content strategies. Additionally, some of the ROAS and KPIs are not very transparent right now, which makes marketing strategies more difficult to prepare.

At the same time, however, I also find this as the biggest potential opportunity where you can shape the customer experience with awesome and interesting content. This means don't just stuff online videos/ads down mobile technologies, but have a clear and precise content strategy that defines and maps user experience throughout the purchase cycle. It is important to consider content for both pre- and post-purchase cycles.

How has data influenced Lorex's business model and major decisions?

When a product goes through its lifecycle, we collect data from our call centers about what customers have said. We spend a lot of time creating dashboards and share all this data with the company internally so we can be aligned. We also read all of our online reviews good and bad and read the bad reviews twice. Then we figure out what's gone wrong or what's going right with a product and determine how to move forward.

What products or services can fans of Lorex look forward to in the future?

We're looking into new technologies to create easy to use products that you can interact with daily. We understand new technology cultures/trends and how the home is becoming smart, so we're coming up with more attractive technologies to lead the way. Our security cameras are great, but installing them requires time, so we're working on making them really simple to install.

You will see us using solar technologies more in the future, and we will be tapping into more smart video analytics that provide you very accurate notifications. The future would be to install the security camera and have it alert you about what's going on using enterprise ML architecture patterns technologies. Notifications like "UPS delivered a package" or "your kids just got home" for example will act as a virtual smart shield for your home.

How will Lorex improve in the future?

At this point, each of our departments owns the customer at a certain point in their journey. We want the company as a whole to "own" the customer, and make every decision based on delighting our customers and enhancing their brand and product experience. That's what matters most.

The Technology Stack Behind the Ecosystem

Building a direct building an ecommerce ecosystem channel from scratch required a technology stack that could scale from zero to nine figures without replatforming. The decisions made in the early days shaped what was possible later.

The foundation was a headless commerce architecture: a commerce engine that exposed APIs, a custom storefront built for performance, and a middleware layer that connected inventory, pricing, and customer data. This was not the default in 2014; most brands used monolithic platforms with tightly coupled themes. The headless bet paid off because it allowed the storefront to evolve independently of the commerce engine.

The inventory challenge was the hardest operational problem. Lorex sold through retail partners, direct online, and international distributors. Each channel needed real-time inventory visibility. The solution was a central inventory service that every channel read from and wrote to, with webhook-based sync that reduced latency from minutes to seconds.

Customer data was the second challenge. A customer who bought from a retail partner and then shopped on the direct channel needed to be recognized. The identity resolution layer stitched together purchase histories across channels, enabling personalized experiences that treated the customer as one person, not three separate profiles.

The analytics layer connected everything: sales data, customer behavior, inventory velocity, and marketing performance. The dashboards were shared across departments so that product, marketing, and operations all worked from the same numbers. This alignment was the cultural change that made the technology investment pay off.

Lessons for Other Brands

The Lorex building an ecommerce ecosystem journey offers transferable lessons for any brand building a direct channel:

1. Start with the customer, not the technology. The technology decisions followed from understanding what the customer needed: fast shipping, accurate inventory, easy returns, and responsive support. Brands that start with technology and then look for customer needs build features nobody uses.

2. Invest in data before personalization. Personalization is only as good as the data behind it. Before investing in recommendation engines or dynamic content, invest in clean event collection, identity resolution, and product data enrichment. The data foundation takes longer to build but enables every personalization tactic that follows.

3. Make the dashboard the meeting. When every department sees the same dashboard, alignment happens naturally. The dashboard becomes the shared language that replaces opinion-based debates with data-based decisions.

4. Hire for the journey, not the destination. The team that builds the channel from zero is different from the team that optimizes it at scale. Hire engineers who can build from scratch, then add engineers who can optimize at scale. The skills are related but not identical.

The Future of Direct-to-Consumer

The building an ecommerce ecosystem ecosystem continues to evolve. The next frontier is not more channels; it is deeper integration between channels. A customer who browses on Instagram, buys on the website, picks up in-store, and returns via mail should have a seamless experience across every touchpoint. The technology to enable this exists; the organizational alignment to execute it is the bottleneck.

Artificial intelligence will play a larger role in the ecosystem: predictive inventory, personalized search, automated customer service, and dynamic pricing. The brands that invest in the data foundation today will be the ones that can deploy AI effectively tomorrow. The brands that treat AI as a feature to be bolted on will find that their data is too fragmented to support it.

Sulaiman's progressive attitude toward technology and improvement has led Lorex to uncharted sales heights. His emphasis on growing the company's building an ecommerce ecosystem ecosystem has yielded impressive returns, and it looks like even more excitement is on the horizon for Lorex in the near future.