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:
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.
I came across a useful free tool for creating heatmaps of your website design at Feng Gui. The site allows you to type in your url or upload an image and it creates a heatmap based on what it thinks a real human would be most likely to look at. The application uses a ViewFinder algorithm to create a saliency map based on objects in the field of view that stand out relative to neighboring items.
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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.
