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When talking to retailers about their online strategy, the topics lately have been about rich Internet application interfaces like AJAX, Flash or Silverlight and social functionality like consumer product reviews.    Despite personally enjoying these topics,  I often try to bring the conversation around to the basics to make sure the retailer has done the basic things like implement accurate real time inventory visibility and accurate tracking through an order management system and set of processes.    Nothing creates a sub par customer experience more than messing up the basic fundamentals of what consumers have come to expect when shopping, tracking, and receiving their order.  The experience I had with Barnes and Noble last week illustrates this pretty well.

My wife was speaking with our daughter’s 4th grade teacher and she told my wife that she wanted to have the class read The Westing Game before school was released for the summer.  Unfortunately, the school library only had a few copies so my wife and I decided to purchase the needed books and donate them to the school.  We spent the following weekend visiting a few book stores and bought all of the copies they had, but we were still short about 10 copies.  (continue reading…)

There’s a good article over at Advertising Age describing profiles of consumers who use Social Media.  Here are a couple of the profiles, for the rest, check out the article.

 ”SOCIALLY ISOLATED
These people are generally unhappy with their lives and feel alone. Not surprisingly, they fall at average or below average for e-mailing. But that doesn’t mean they eschew social media. In fact, they’re 12% more likely than the average person to use blogs, message boards or social-networking sites. They also post comments on blogs at least twice a month; personal, music, consumer-product and video-game blogs are most visited. ”

 ”BRAND-LOYAL
This group shies away from buying unknown brands just for a bargain and prefers to buy brand-name goods. They’re very average social-media users, but some subjects of interest drive them to social media more than the average person: They’re 21% more likely to read environmental blogs and 22% more likely to use professional-networking sites to make new contacts. ”

There are 9 profiles in all.

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 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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Barnes & Noble refreshed their website recently and some of the additions are useful but overall falls short.    When you reach the refreshed site, a 1/3 of the page is dedicated to B&N picks presented in a scrolling flash window.  Unfortunately, you are only given a pause button instead of back/forward/skip a page controls.  This leads to problems when you are interested in an item and you don’t get your mouse up to it quick enough, it’s off the page and you have to wait for a full rotation to get back to it.   It’s also dissappointing that in 2007 the picks are selections chosen by BN without any regard to who I am.  (continue reading…)

Yesterday I attended the JeffNJoe MSDN .NET Tiki Hut Roadshow in Palm Beach.   Jeff and Joe presented Expression Web, Silverlight 1.0 and 1.1, and a mash-up using Virtual Earth.   By far, the most interesting topic was Silverlight, Microsoft’s new Rich Internet Application(RIA) cross browser, cross platform plug-in.  The 1.0 version available now, definitely looks and feels like Adobe Flash, however it has much improved video playback functionality including High Definition playback.  Beyond the use for video, I wouldn’t seriously consider using it for RIA applications on a major ecommerce site because of limitations to available controls, development language availability, and that it’s a 1.0 environment.   Beyond those issues, pervasive adoption of the plug-in is not there yet.  If you decided to utilize Silverlight, your site will probably be the first one that a consumer would be exposed to it, therefore they will have to download the 1.1 meg plug-in and go through the installation, even though Microsoft has made it very seamless and easy to do.

The 1.1 version of Silverlight due out sometime next year on the other hand shows a lot of promise.  Beyond the capabilities existing in 1.0, it is also expected to include support for many controls such as button, textbox, scrollbar, listbox, and checkbox which will bring the basic abilities up to the bare basics compared with Adobe Flex.  You’ll also see support for additional language support beyond javascript including C#, VB.Net, Python, and Ruby.

Three of the most interesting demo’s shown that retailers can relate to were live streaming video of the HSN channel, Silverlight Airlines travel booking, and a prototype  for viewing different home goods and furniture items in a room.  (continue reading…)

The first content oriented keynote at shop.org was given by Kelly Mooney, President and Chief Experience Officer of Resource Interactive, a leading interactive marketing services firm.  Kelly’s talk centered around the idea of OPEN brands which stands for O – On demand, P – Personal, E – Engaging, N – Networked.   She pointed out that marketing strategy around brands is changing in which the consumer is affecting your brand through blogs, reviews, and social linking.  Brand owners need to determine if they are going to remain closed or embrace the consumer forces.  Kelly and other folks from Resource Interactive have written a book on the subject called the OPEN Brandwhich is due out in October in ebook form and print in December.  I’m definitely going to pick it up when it’s available.

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shop.org in underway and it’s grown 10x in the last 6 years.  6 Years ago, shop.org had about 200 attendees and for 2007 the unofficial attendee number is about 2000 consisting of about 500 retail organizations with a 70% larger exhibit hall than last year.  The show is focusing on 4 main areas that were requested by its membership. 

1.  Analytics
2. Merchandising for conversions
3. Search & SEO
4. Web 2.0

I’ve got to get back to the show, but later tonight I’ll cover the main points from the keynotes and what I’ve heard and learned.  Looks like it’s going to be a great event.

Avinash Kaushik worked at Intuit as the Director of Web Research & Analytics on their 60+ web properties and is currently an independent consultant working for companies like Google. He is the author of a recently released book called Web Analytics: An Hour A Day.  

I recently had the opportunity to talk with Avinash about retailers use of web analytics. Join me in this Q and A session as he explains how retailers can get the most from their analytics.

What is the toughest challenge today that a retailer faces related to web analytics?

Overcoming the perception that web analytics by itself will solve all their data / decision making problems.

Most retailers, I think, “get it” that they need data and they have web analytics tools. The challenge is that they think just torturing that data enough will give them all the insights they need. The reality is that they probably need more than one tool and they need people/skills to be able to leverage those tools.

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Jeremiah Owyang, a Web Strategist in the valley wrote an interesting blog post, The Irrelevant Corporate Website. The majority of the statements are correct around the idea that corporations should be embracing community systems and the content produced around that community as they provide trust, buy in, and feedback to learn from.

However I have to disagree with the post title and overall statement on the relevance of corporate sites. Jeremiah couldn’t actually believe that corporate sites as we have them today are irrelevant. (continue reading…)