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…)
