Variable Markup

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. 

Yesterday I completed my national civic duty to the economy and to the retail industry by finishing up my shopping for the holidays and spending twice the amount I budgeted.  It started at 4am on black Friday and finished up yesterday at Circuit City for a few last minute stocking stuffers. 

My wife was able to score a Wii for the kids on the first try at EB Games by waiting in line before they opened yesterday.  Getting there a couple hours early, she was still third in line.  I received txt messages every 20 minutes with updates on how it was going.  When she completed payment and I received the call, she sounded like she picked 5 numbers in the Florida lottery.  It really makes me wonder if they would have sold as many Wii’s if they were available in every store. 

Well, I’ve done my part.  Let’s hope that UPS and Fedex do theirs in getting the last online orders delivered by Monday. 

 Now I’ve got to go grocery shopping for Christmas Eve dinner.  <sigh>

I’m giving Bestbuy.com a C+ for their holiday widget strategy this holiday season.  They provided two widgets, one in the form of Yahoo Widgets for your desktop and the second for igoogle.  Both are identical in look and functionality.  The visual design was well done, although the functionality came up short IMO.  Details below.

This is the first view of the widget which allows you to add holidays that you are planning for.  I added Christmas and Valentines day.  It then also allows you to take notes for each of the holidays you have added to your list.
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I’m not sure I can think of a worse story to come out at Christmas time for a retailer.  Right in the middle of the peak of the holiday shopping season, a store manager at Dillards in Texas decided to eject a disabled Marine Iraq war veteran out of the store because he had a service dog with him to help keep his balance. 

 What was that manager thinking?  It’s been in the news and all over the blogosphere.  I did some searching to see how many blog posts were out there, but unfortunately couldn’t get an accurate number due to spam in the Google blog index.  From a cursory glance, it was quite a bit.  Obviously these posts also generated quite a few comments.  A post at the Consumerist had 114 comments and 602 Diggs since posting their message and has been viewed more than 18,000 times in less than 3 days. 

 Word of mouth marketing is working over time on this one. 

Strong words from the CEO of Ikea.  Furniture Today has an article today that says that a memo is making the rounds in Sweden from Anders Dahlvig, CEO and President.

“According to the memo, which came from Anders Dahlvig, Ikea’s CEO and president, the Swedish company will focus on the in-store experience as “the only sales channel,” putting a halt on “further investments to develop the Home Shopping or Online sales channel(s).”"

An Ikea spokesman followed up later stating that there are no plans to discontinue ecommerce in the US.

This is a surprising move for Ikea, given the fact that their supply chain and merchandise is specifically designed to be small and transportable before reaching the consumer.  Out of all of the furniture retailers, these guys are set up perfectly to excel in the ecommerce market. 

I’m a firm believer in focusing on a few things you can do really well, but abandoning the ecommerce market is a bit too narrow for me.   Either way, it’ll be interesting to watch.

I haven’t been writing much over the past couple weeks because I’ve been focused on developing a new mashup app that will track the top 500+ ecommerce sites on the web.    Trying to keep up with what the top companies are doing is always a difficult and time consuming task so I decided to pull information together in one place.   I’ve written a few spiders as well as some mashup code with Compete, ZoomInfo, and Google API’s to build a dossier on each of the best sites. 

Please check out The Top Ecommerce Sites and let me know what you think. 

Currently I’m tracking on each site:

• Snapshots of the home page
• Google Page Rank
• Backlinks from major search engines
• Traffic via Compete
• Company data from ZoomInfo
• Types of technology used and sizes (i.e. html, images, flash, javascript)
• User submitted comments and reviews
• 1-5 Star ratings submitted by users
• References in the Blogosphere
• Google News

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Brandon over at “The life and times” wrote up a great article on Optimizing for Google Product Search (Formerly Froogle).   Definitely worth checking out. 

Gas stations in Colorado and Chicago started accepting Pay by Touch payment using biometric fingerprint scanning.  Your fingerprint is associated to a payment method on file through a pre-registration process and allows you to pay for your gas without pulling out your wallet.   Pay By Touch, the company providing the solution has been around for 5 years and is based in San Francisco.   According to their website, much of their retail sucess has been in grocery with Albertsons, Jewel-Osco, Piggly Wiggly, Lowes Foods,  and Harris Teeter.

Articles on the subject:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21576756

 http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_4376813

http://www.daytondailynews.com/n/content/oh/story/news/local/2007/07/14/ddn071407dlm.html