Off the Shelf: The Retail & CPG Blog

LinkedIn recently announced launch of its open application platform for others to develop social applications. (http://blogs.zdnet.com/social/?p=600). Out of those, the one which caught my attention was an application named as the “Reading List” developed by Amazon. Those, who haven’t seen this yet, would probably want to take a look at the Demo video on YouTube. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNlANI9juY8). However, if you think about this, this is not the first time somebody has developed an application like this on a social network.  So, you might be wondering as to what makes this one different?

Two things which I may point out –

1) This one is developed by Amazon, whereas other social networking applications on other networks are mainly developed by individual developers. So, one can expect that this is only the tip of the iceberg and there is more to come in terms of achieving synergies between LinkedIn and Amazon and we might see much more functionality added to this app in the near future.

2) With Reading List, LinkedIn has become part of Amazon’s affiliate network and thus generating an additional source of income. (A closer look of the application and URLs shows that LinkedIn has an Amazon affiliate tag inserted in all the links which goes out from LinkedIn to Amazon via this app).

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/014302910X/ref=cm_li_v_cr_self?tag=linkedin-20

To me this integration between Amazon and LinkedIn looks much cleaner than other applications seen previously on networks like FaceBook (http://www.facebook.com/apps/#/apps/application.php?id=2397701323&b=&ref=pd_r). The prospects are immense - There is much more which can be done with this application and many more functionalities, which I would like to see in this, but nonetheless this is a good start. Some of the features would come best if developed in joint collaboration between Amazon and LinkedIn - a few functionalities listed below may require customer profile sharing between Amazon and LinkedIn.

1) Access to LinkedIn Profile data can take Amazon’s personalized recommendations to the next level. Especially considering that Amazon never had as much insight into Customer’s interests as that can be got from this exposure.

As an example, consider this scenario: If LinkedIn can pass the Customer’s interests data to Amazon and Amazon can parse that information intelligently and generate recommendations based on it. Also, if other people in the network have any of the recommendations generated by Amazon it can be boosted further as part of recommendation algorithm. This will make recommendations far more relevant and interesting to a specific customer. Wouldn’t that be something to consider?

2) Next, I would love to see the “Buy Together” kinds of promotions generated out of the reading list from my network on LinkedIn. This type of feature can generate more sales for Amazon, additional affiliate revenue for LinkedIn and of course extra savings for the consumer. Any “Buy together” promotion generated out of the customer’s network reading list will have more chances of conversion compared to books otherwise suggested by Amazon on their product detail pages.  In future, Amazon can come up time to time with such promotions for LinkedIn customers as part of Reading List app.

Posted by Rockey Nebhwani at 5:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

If someone were to write a book called “Great eCommerce Site Launches in History”, the book would be very thin.  With few exceptions, the replacement of an existing eComm Platform with a new one is a wild ride filled with crashes, slow-downs, time-outs, and roll-backs.  In this post, I will discuss the source of these bad experiences, and how to improve the situation on your next project.

Early in the project, the team is focused on gathering the requirements, creating the customer experience and designing the back end connections to the legacy systems.  “Going live” seems safely in the distant future, and gets very little attention up front.  As a result, the deployment is handled by a team that is exhausted from the push to finish the coding on time.  Errors are made and sites crash.  Revenue is lost, managers are embarrassed, programmers are stressed out, etc.  There has to be a better way.

A better way would be to think of a new eComm system rollout as two projects, not one.   One project goes from strategy to the end of unit testing and the other starts when the programming is done. Two managers, equally skilled, should be assigned, one Programming Manager and one Deployment.  At the moment very that the programming manager is totally exhausted, the Deployment Manager takes over with a fresh outlook and fully-charged batteries.  While the development team was killing itself to hit the deadlines, the Deployment Manager was managing the installation of the new hardware, preparing the testing environments, getting the test scripts done, planning for the performance testing, etc.  Once the unit-tested code gets checked in, the focus moves from software development to testing and rollout. 

Another improvement is to actually plan for the inevitable system failure in the first few weeks after you try and go live.  Instead of saying a prayer and turning the new system on for 100% of your customers, it would be far better to put a few customers on the new site, and then increasing it steadily over the following 4 to 6 weeks until 100% of the customers are converted over.  The alternative is to pretend that you can really find all of the bugs, when you know that you cannot, because no one ever has.  By turning on a few users, you can normally defer bugs that show up only under a heavy load for a few weeks.  This gives you time to work out the logic errors before the whole world, including you management is watching.

Posted by Stephen Alan Potts at 9:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The global slowdown is clearly hitting consumers. Daily tales of restricted financing, foreclosures, and credit denial are all too frequent in the media. Yet, online channels seem to, if anything, be benefitting from this relative economic slowdown. In an article reviewing such changes in the Wall Street Journal (Nov.13th 08, "Net Gains" - Nikesh Arora, Google Snr VP, & Pres. EMEA) the indicators for self service and shopping online seemed to be tracking upwards as consumers look for value and cost reduction.

For example, online sales in UK (Europe's largest online market) in first 6 months of 08 were up 38% at £26.5bn. THis is the equivalent of 17p in every £1! Overall, this tracks the changes across Europe where online sales have doubled in the last 4 years. While shop sales have fallen in this same period individual companies seem to be benefitting from this trend, e.g. Mothercare (UK) 28% increase in online sales in 15 weeks to mid July while its shops saw a 1% decline, DSG (Electrical retailers) saw e-commerce growth of 6% while its shops declined by 7%. And this trend seems to be putting Europe at the forefront of e-commerce. This at a time when it is still only 42% of the European population who are connected to broadband internet. However, with phones featuring internet access increasingly as standard, there are now 150 million people who shop over the internet (still only 1/3 of the total population). Countries like the UK, Europe's online leader, has registered 60% as many sales online as the US, with only 1/5 the population!

It is believed this points to the start of a transformation of buying habits as consumers seem more willing to buy goods which even require fitting, a clear distinction which prevented people from exploring online in times past. For example, Glasses Direct receives an order for spectacles every 10 minutes. Increasingly this is evidence of people browsing and even specifying their purchases online or in actual stroes before heading back to the net to make a final purchase. Certainly with discounts and bargains costing 50% or less on sites such as eBay, established vendors will need to focus ont heir online offerings to ensure they are not merely a high price shop window, with their browsing customers heading elsewhere to make a final purchase. Online offerings need to compare themselves to their direct competitors, and potentially indirect competitors such as eBay and Amazon, to establish a price and service differential to both retain their existing customer base, and position themselves for this rise in online purchases.

Posted by Billy Byatt at 1:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

With the polls now shut, votes counted, and electoral college votes apportioned, we now have a new President-Elect in the U.S. It is a historic moment watched by all around the world, and as the previous blog entry discusses, it is one where the internet has played a pivotal role - in campaign funding, debates, electoral registration and voting. The new President-Elect will be tasked with implementing his programme as quickly as possible to harness this landslide win. However, it is easy to get lost in the detail, and this is where the parallel for MCC deployments is apt. While a grand plan and key actions are key, the devil will truly be, "In the detail".

The same is true for an Multi Channel deployment. In many ways, like an electroal platform which Obama will seek to implement, the 'Vision thing' is relatively straightforward, so too the main party planks to the platform. In business, the business case for working across channels to lower cost and map to customer preferences is again quite straightforward with a simple ROI through cost savings and increased sales. The design based upon leading technologies, and mapping to current processes is then undertaken with small changes to reflect unique differentiators.

So far, so good. Except like the larger problem Obama faces, having a plan, and submitting new ligislation is not the same as seeing those programmes implemented successfully. In Obama's case, he must still work with a Senate which has only a slight majority for his party, so filibusters will still be a problem. For a multi channel deployment similarly, while the design and deployment of a multi channel program may follow standard project deployment methodologies, how is an organisation to ensure the realisation of the benefits which were promised.

I recently finished a project in which the recommendations which the business required were relatively easy to produce. Unfortunately, in discussions within the business to arrive at the findings, any new recommendations were considered pointless as the business was not set up to handle any more fucntionality as it consumed the deliverables in a non-standard way. This is the 'filibuster' equivalent which any deployment will face, and more so for multi channel as new data sources are merged. This aspect of cultural change is not to be under-estimated, both for internal users, and for external customers. Questions will need to be asked, and answered: Which users will migrate to the new channels? What is the incentive for them to do so? How will the organisation be re-aligned to support the new channels? How will the channels aid pro-active customer contact, as well as reactive? How will the disparate data sources (and potentially data models) of the new channels be aligned? How will Customer facing gain access to the alternate channel data to ensure end-2-end Customer visibility?

It is worth remembering how a perfect project, a workable design, a sound business case for multi channel expansion can fail. Not from any oversight from a project delivery or original definition perspective but because the cultural change is under-estimated or even ignored completely. Just like the task facing Obama who is riding a wave of expectation as a 'unifier', make sure your plans are seen in their true context for the organisation so that all areas can be brought on board to ensure the success of a multi channel deployment and to prevent a very expensive program from becoming just one more toy or nightmare for IT!

Posted by Billy Byatt at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was on a conference call this morning waiting for invitees to join.  Someone made a comment, in jest, that perhaps all of the missing attendees were out voting so I had to ask, “Why would anyone go out in the cold (okay, relative cold as it is 55F in southern Cali) and spend their time standing in line for the opportunity to enter a very small booth so they can punch their ballot, and perhaps risk a dangling chad?”

Due to my travel model, I have relied on absentee balloting for decades.  But if I were to stop traveling tomorrow, I would still use absentee balloting because it is so convenient!!!  I don’t have to wait in line.  No weather to brave.  I vote at my leisure, in the comfort of my home, on my schedule.  I can start voting, take a pause to do some research online, and continue whenever I want.  Although absentee ballots are still the minority, during this election, some counties are expecting 40% of voters to be mailing it in.

 

So when I posed this question on my conference call, a colleague responded: “For the experience.”  Why would anyone want this kind of experience?  Unnaturally, my brain made the leap to commerce – personally, my preferred method of shopping is online for all the same reasons I like voting via absentee ballot.  Although I have been successful at completely avoiding the need to physically interact with a voting facility to exercise my Constitutional right, I haven’t come very close to removing brick and mortar stores from my life.  I guess I’m not alone since, according to the latest figures, online retailing is estimated at only 4% of total retail revenue.  In some cases, I actually like going to a store (shocking admission from a man who likes to shop) – I suppose it’s the experience.  I think I like being able to compare cameras and televisions side by side.  I like being able to match a suit with a shirt and a tie.  I like going straight to the ice cream freezer and grabbing a pint of Cinnamon Buns ice cream without having to browse the entire store.

So how do we meld the “experience” of physical shopping in a store with the convenience of the online experience?  Several retailers have made strides in this already:

    * Check out comparison capabilities with deep search and filtering on sites like SonyStyle.com and Nikestore.com.  I can start really broad and narrow down my sea of selections with real time updates to the superset by selecting criteria and filtering attributes.
    * I love the virtual closets on OSOYOU.com and WetSeal.com (although nothing on Wet Seal’s site fits me anymore).  These virtual closets are integrated to social commerce capabilities so I can solicit advice/ suggestions/ ridicule from friends and strangers without dragging them to the mall.
    * Got milk?  Check out Safeway.com or Peapod.com and try out their logically laid out assortments.  Maybe I’m not in the mood for Cinnamon Buns ice cream after all, but I can navigate to the ice cream aisle of the site just like l would if I walked into my local store: walk inside, skip the basket since I’m only buying ONE pint today, go straight to the frozen section, then the ice cream shelves – ahh, now I can browse all of these delectable Ben and Jerry’s pint sized containers.  No frills, bells, nor whistles, yet perfect in function.

Of course, the online experience is still far from perfect.  Many experiences are still unique to the brick and mortar experience, e.g. trying on jeans to make sure they’re not too tight and not too baggy, interacting with live salespeople for personalized advice on what shoes are best for running.

I also find that the unique experiences I noted above are isolated to specific sites dedicated to one or two categories, that is, I can find virtual closets on some apparel retailer sites and electronics retailers often have good comparison features, but I haven’t found a general merchandise retailer who offers all of these great experiences within one site.  I love being able to do one stop shopping inside your store, and I’d really love to experience unique, category specific experiences when I shop your site online!

I don’t really think online shopping will ever completely replace the brick and mortar shopping experience entirely.  So I would love to hear from my fellow consumers: how can the experience of online shopping evolve to become as compelling an alternative as absentee balloting?

 

Posted by Lester Lam at 10:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)