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. 

 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.

Check out the dataset and visualizations at http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/topichub/mAgULsOtha6IBFTvcOgL2-.

The data came from my top ecommerce sites mashup.

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

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

I plan to track in the future:

• Catalog features of each site (i.e. Reviews, social aspects, single page checkout)
• Stock & finance information
• Other traffic sources
• Open jobs
• Competitors
• Snapshots of other pages like product detail for historical reviews

The site, data, and code is still beta, so problems may come up.  If you see any, please send me a note of what you see and I’ll look into fixing it. 

Please contribute to the resource by rating and writing a review for some of the sites.  I’m primarily looking for thoughts on design, SEO, structure and ability of the sites.   If you have a blog or website, the reviews are set to follow, so in exchange for your review, you’ll get get a link back to your site.   Every comment is moderated for spam and foul language prior to it being published. 

If you have any thoughts, ideas on features or api’s that would be useful, or questions you would like to ask, please send me an email (link in the sidebar).

Last, a note of thanks out to Suresh.  I appreciate your help during late nights and weekends helping me put this together.    It’s appreciated.

Personally, I’m having fun looking at the search results that google is providing.  It’s interesting to look at the various ecommerce sites and their SEO optimization as it is clearly coming into play here.  When you take out the millions of other pages google would have included in the mix, you can start to compare multiple retailers and how they’ve been optimized for organic search.

I’ll have the top ~ 500  ecommerce retail websites in the search engine by Tuesday or so.  I’m currently up to 128 for testing purposes.  The top 500+ ecommerce sites in the US are currently in the search engine which should give a wide array of stores to search.   Over time I’ll add & subtract from the overall list to improve the searching.

I have another search engine in the works for retail industry research.  It should be done in the next week or so. 

If you try it out, please send me an email or leave a comment on how well it works for you.  I’m still trying to tweak it. 

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. 

Another item of interest is the product cloud at the bottom showing the “Most Popular Search Terms”.   I don’t know how much others find this useful, but I’m really into tag clouds.  It’s useful to determine what’s hot in the space the cloud is segregated to. 

The problem with the implementation is that it’s only on the main page and it had search terms from the whole site.    I find it odd to see Halo, Harry Potter, Pulp Fiction and The Wisdom of Menopause all of the same popularity/importance presented to me.   On the main page, this is fine although not very useful.  But when I go to the landing page for the Computing & Internet category (or any other), there’s no product cloud.   This is where I think it has the most power.  First let me the consumer tell you a little bit about what I’m interested in.   Then present the hot areas that other people have been looking for confined to my area of interest.  In that context, it becomes an invitation for me to explore further that I probably didn’t intend to explore before. 

Customer reviews are still no where to be found.  I don’t get it.

I don’t know if they always had this, but I noticed that they have an option to purchase the books used from other resellers.   I’ve never found this feature to be that great on Amazon as I normally buy 5-10 books at a time online and I don’t want them coming from 3-7 places.   I would have much preferred to see customer reviews than this feature.

Lastly, I don’t know that it has any relation to this refresh, but BN teamed up with Digby to offer their books via mobile ecommerce on Blackberry’s.   A special Blackberry applet needs to be downloaded to puruse the catalog and purchase.  I’m going to download the app in a few days as it seems that the digby site is being slammed with traffic at the moment.   

 Werner Vogel’s(CTO of Amazon.com) attached an architecture paper on his blog All Things Distributed.  The paper covers the architecture in place for Amazon’s distributed storage system. 

If storage system architecture for extremely scalable ecommerce sites is not your thing, I saw that Harvard Business Review conducted an interview with Jeff Bezo’s(CEO of Amazon.com).   The interview focuses on strategy and how it’s formulated at Amazon.  The graphic on page 2 showing the product line expansion, feature inclusion and sales revenue is great review of the company looking back. 

Both are definitely worth the read. 

NRF Stores magazine releases a chart with the top 50 ecommerce sites voted on by consumers.

Top 50 Article   Top 50 Chart

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. 

The HSN live video siteis a great combination of high quality video and audio with great interactivity for looking at different product images, jumping to other products of interest, sharing the item with friends and the option to buy the product being shown.  It definitely looks like the interfaces we were dreaming about in interactive tv a decade ago that never materialized.  With Silverlight 1.0′s strong reliance on video capabilities, it makes me wonder how much Microsoft is betting on Silverlight for their interactive tv ambitions over the next few years. 

 Silverlight Airlines is a fictitious airline travel site which allows you to draw a line from city to city and drag start and end dates on a calendar to start your flight selection.  Once selected, it will then show you the available flights at the various possible times and the route they will take to get you to your destination. 

Telerik, an ISV which creates development controls for .Net, Silverlight and other environments created a prototype using their Cube control which shows a virtual living room and allows you to click on items in the room and it starts a cube spinning of various items you might want to see placed in the room.  This interface provides some great eye candy at first glance, although I have to question it’s usefulness in a real retailers site.   One of the biggest benefits of online commerce today is the broad selection of products on a site.  I don’t see how 6 options per placement is going to be a viable alternative to faceted search navigation and filtering when looking at many products.  For some reason, a hectohedron(100 sides) doesn’t seem like a user friendly way of selecting products.

The other demo shown that was probably more compelling than these was a site produced for the Orlando Magic by Lightmaker.   It was a full RIA interface for ecommerce which allowed you to pick your favorite Magic player on a light box sort of interface and then drill into the products related to that player.  Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find a public site with the app, but I included the link above which has some screen shots.  I’ll send a note to Jeff and Joe and see if they can provide me the link to the public location. 

All in all, Microsoft is coming on strong with Silverlight and will be applying pressure on Adobe and their combination of Flash and Flex in the Adobe Integrated Runtime.  I am definitely looking forward to working with this technology and see what retailers do with these capabilities in the coming year. 

Please drop me a note or comment on this article if you are doing anything with Silverlight or plan to in the future. 

The first thing I noticed was the “Magic  Book Shelf” and immediately got my hopes up for something really cool and useful.  Unfortunately, it’s a Flash object consisting of a static set of books, movies, and music that scrolls through 2-3 pages of 5 books per page.  There was no way of going deeper beyond the initial set of chosen books and navigation is unintuitive to say the least.  I kept trying to drag the focus on the bookshelf to other areas with no effect and found that only selecting the listed menu items on the right had any affect.   It does have a “picked for you” feature once you sign in.  I found the feature to be unhelpful in discovering new books, but hopefully that’s because I don’t have a large purchase history for them to mine from and it will improve with time. 

The site sports a faceted search navigation menu on the left.  Although I was surprised to not find facets for a couple common categories in the fiction section like mystery or true crime.   Also listing the number of books besides the facet is a bit scary with 6293 Action & Adventure books yet only a 122 “Classics”.   I found that when clicking on the Action section, I could only drill down further by format, special features(Abridged, Annotated, Large Print, etc.), price and Best Sellers.  

The power from my perspective in having faceted navigation is drilling down through a large number of product in the specific facets that mean something to me like author facets (Clancy vs. Ludlum) and finer genres like Spy books,  WWII Military, Viet Nam Military, etc..  It seems like they are getting the consumer to 6,293 books and then pushing them off the cliff to find what they want. 

Another interesting section of the Borders beta is the media section which includes sections on Harry Potter, Bill Clinton’s new book, Advice for Living, and a book club.  Each section has various high quality videos and audio pieces on the subject produced by Borders.    This is definitely interesting, but I would have liked to have seen a more social community environment where videos and audio produced by Harry Potter Fans would be shown.  Or at least shown next to the Borders content. 

 Available to Promise and Reservation of a product is a new welcomed addition.  This has been one of my biggest frustrations with book retailers, in that there hasn’t been a way to find the closest store that has the book I want in stock so I can pick it up in the next couple hours.  Borders provides the ability to enter zip, city & state to find the book you are currently viewing the details on.  It then tells you if they don’t have it(special order required) or that it’s “Likely in Stock”.    If you select the reserve button, it will send the request to the store and it tells you that you’ll receive an email back to let you know that it is in fact in stock and being held for you.  It says that the email is usually returned in 2 hours. 

On the product details page, a small comment is under the price listed stating that the prices may vary by store.  From a multichannel perspective, it’s dissappointing and confusing that the prices could vary.  In this day and age, why would you charge different prices for the same book in two stores in the same area?  If you have to charge differently at each store, list the price next to the availability. 

It is in a beta stage, so I would hope that it will change prior to full launch, however I can’t help but feel the product detail pages are very sparce compared to competitors.  Beyond the manufacturer data, reviews are short and seldomly found, and functionality I’ve come to expect such as “Customers who bought this, also bought this” or “this is better together with this” is nonexistant.

Surprisingly enough, the site didn’t do a great job of making the page very optimized for organic search.  They could have easily done simplified URL’s listing the book title and instead chose to use SKU#.  They also have quite a few validation issues in the CSS & HTML, but I’m sure that will be worked out by the time they go live. 

If anyone checks it out, I’d love to hear what you think.