Variable Markup

I found this video on youtube that shows the new concept stores being rolled out by Borders.  It’s a good looking store, but I don’t see anything new. 

In case you missed it, there was a good article by CNN Money that covers Target’s Executive team, why they are different and how they are preparing for the departure of their CEO. http://money.cnn.com/2008/03/18/news/companies/reingold_target.fortune/index.htm

Standing in a Barnes & Noble, flipping through a book you are considering to purchase, you can now pull out your cell phone, write a txt a message to 262966 (Amazon on a phone pad) that contains the ISDN, UPC code, or name of the book and Amazon will reply back with the price of the book and an offer to buy it.    The book could now be 20-40% cheaper if you are willing to wait a couple days for shipping. 

The next versions are sure to include being able to take a picture of the UPC with your phone camera, send that up and receive your price and availability of the product. 

 This time next year, it will be interesting to know what percentage of retail store sales are pre-scanned at Amazon before purchase. 

 Also consider the possibilities of advertising.  While walking through the airport, an advertisement panel on the wall shows the latest Iacocca leadership book and at the bottom it gives you the Amazon SMS # and a short code for the product.  In two minutes you’ve purchased the book. 

About six months ago we designed a similar addon module for Blue Martini Commerce that would allow this type of sms commerce.  It fell in the priority list as being a little too far out there from a consumer adoption standpoint.  Looks like we will need to reconsider. 

There’s an interesting article in the Seattle Post Intelligencer about AT&T Cellular stores being the first retailer to roll out Microsoft’s Surface technology. 

It’s funny that AT&T is the first to deploy the technology when one of the main demos for Surface has been a T-Mobile in-store kiosk. 

The stores that will get the tables can be found here:

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Sorry, I haven’t been posting much the last couple weeks.  Between travel and moving my blog from my old host to a new one because of service issues, my time has been sparse.   I came across this presentation “The future of advertising” and it talks about old marketing vs. new marketing and has some great quotes from leaders in the space.  Definitely worth checking out. 

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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…)

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.

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