Variable Markup

Sitepoint, one of my favorite web design communities just released a CSS Reference -http://reference.sitepoint.com/css for looking up syntax and semantics for CSS. 

Circuit City’s CEO Philip Schoonover has done a couple interviews this week, one with the WSJ and the other with the Times-Dispatch of Richmond, VA (Circuit City’s Headquarters).  Here are some of the more interesting questions and answers from the two interviews. 

WSJ: Why do you think the new, smaller-sized store will improve Circuit City’s profitability and sales growth?

Mr. Schoonover: It offers a different experience. Customers can touch and compare, and learn how to use the most complex products and services that we sell.
 
It is a more efficient use of space. Typically, our stores are 35,000 square feet, and less than 18,000 of that is selling space. The new prototype is 20,000 and has 17,000 of selling space. This fundamentally changes the economics. We can get higher revenue per square foot, higher-margin dollars per square foot, and we can find additional sites that weren’t necessarily available for our old box.

I’m a big believer in high interactivity shopping experiences, so it will be interesting to see what they do with the new store format.  The main concern I have is the smaller stores.  Will this mean a smaller product selection?  Will they turn into the Radio Shacks in the malls?  It’s almost as if they are positioning themselves between Best Buy and Apple, and I’m not sure they can build an identity between these two and flourish.   Apple has set the bar high for shopping experience and Best Buy’s product selection is better than all except for Fry’s and a couple regional players.  (continue reading…)

Here’s another visualization which shows the ecommerce sites in the top 500 which use Adobe Flash on their site.   While this is not a clear indicator of good use of Flash, it does give a sense of how much flash is used.  I use it to look at the sites to see who’s doing innovative things with Flash.    Although, it could just show that they have poorly optimized Flash that is bloated.  The current retailers using the most Flash are SonyStyle, Nike, Dicks Sporting Goods, and Disney Direct. 

Changing the label at the bottom left corner to Retail Vertical will show the top use of Flash by retail category instead.

Update: I’ve moved the visualization to after the click as it was too much on the homepage. (continue reading…)

I created a Retail and Ecommerce topic hub at IBM’s Many Eyes project for others that might be interested in adding thier own retail data and visualizations.   Stop by and join in on the fun!

I’ve been playing around with the data visualization tools at IBM’s Many Eye’s project and came up with a visualization in a treeview that shows the top 500+ ecommerce sites split by category of retailer with google page rank.  It’s an interesting way to look at the data as you quickly see that apparel & accessories dominates number of retailers in the top 500.  Following the apparel category is Specialty/Non-Apparel, Housewares, and Computers/Electronics. 

 An alternative interesting view can be see by dragging the retail vertical to the position between google page range and site.  This will group everything by page rank showing that there’s only 4 retailers with a GPR of 9. 

Update: I’ve moved the visualization to after the click as it was too much on the homepage. (continue reading…)

Beginning Jan 30th, Walmart says that they will charge suppliers a $2 fee for every pallet shipped without an RFID tag to their Sam’s Club distribution center in Texas.  According to an article in InformationWeek, Walmart still has 15,000 suppliers that have not complied with the mandate of RFID tag usage.  It appears that they have selected Sam’s Club to start strong enforcement of the mandate because of it’s lower number of suppliers and stores. 

Today I was able to walk the conference floor at NRF and see what’s new and by far the most interesting (and busiest) demo was in Microsoft’s booth of their new Surface technology.  The person running the demo ran through several applications with a constant crowd surrounding his area.  I was able to get close enough to take some quick pictures.  These pics and quick video are a snowboard customization demo and of a T-Mobile app for use in stores for comparing phones.

(continue reading…)

I’m in NYC for NRF’s Big Show.  It’s pretty chilly in NYC staying between 30-35F, although it’s considered warm for most NRF shows.  We got very lucky this morning as forecasters yesterday were predicting up to 9 inches of snow during the night.  Fortunately, when I woke up, only about an inch had fallen and it was already melted except on rooftops. 

I’ve spent the majority of my time in customer and vendor meetings so I haven’t had a chance to get out and see what’s new.  I’m hoping to do that tomorrow. 

ARTS, the standards body for NRF announced yesterday the release of the Service Oriented Architecture Blueprint for Retail which I was quoted for.  There seems to be a lot of interest in the document at the show.  I’m looking forward to hearing feedback on the blueprint as the team put in many hours in the construction. 

Google just release Google Checkout Trends.   Similar in nature to Google Trends where you can compare the popularity of search terms, here Google is allowing you to compare sales of products or brands that were paid for through Google Checkout. 

After playing with it a bit, I started to think about how it might be used by retailers for useful information.  One of the clear ways may be to look at two brands like I’ve done in the screenshot below.  Comparing shoes from the brands Sebago and Rockport, show they are fairly even in their success overall, but show very different peaks and valleys.   I think it would be interesting to compare Google’s results to your own sales metrics and see how they differ.

When checking it out, be sure to zoom in on specific time frames and price points.  You can start to see patterns of how the products do at various points.   

Merchandisers will have to keep in mind that this sales data is only for online transactions and those that went through Google Checkout, which is an extremely small portion of online sales at the moment.  Never the less, it can still show interesting trends. 

One of the disappointing things that makes this less useful is that Google only shows top tier items so trying to compare products

While surfing I came across Beyond Alt Text:  Making the Web Easy to Use for Users With Disabilitiesfrom the Nielsen Norman Group.   It’s normally $124, but they are giving it away for free for the holidays.   Accessibility design has become increasingly important over the last few years with ecommerce websites due to rulings in the courts that sites such as Target.com must be accessible.   

 It’s a good time in the year to look at your site and determine if you are compliant.