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>

 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. 

“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.

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. 

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. 

 I was able to play the first few chapters Friday night without having to return to Best Buy immediately.  After the fourth chapter or so, I started getting errors and gave up for the evening.  I returned to Best Buy the next morning and was met with smiles as I passed store associates as they clearly knew why I was there. 

When I arrived at the customer service counter, the associate asked if they were scratched, I told him they were and he explained that it’s been happening with most of the Limited Edition boxes that have been sold.  He then proceeded to grab a stack of 7-8 boxes and proceeded to open them.  Everyone of the boxes had the dvd’s floating around with scars on each one.   Finally I decided to just get another edition that doesn’t come in the metal box and went on my way. 

I really appreciated the service received at Best Buy.  They didn’t try to get me to deal with Microsoft through their replacement program, or give me the run around on how the discs got scarred.  This minor design flaw by Microsoft is going to cost them a fortune.  Worse than that, think of the costs and strain on the retailers this is going to have.  If one in a dozen are actually good, they are shipping back thousands of these boxes and will have to reconcile the returns process with Microsoft. 

The folks at Best Buy I talked to didn’t know if Microsoft was going to do a recall, but clearly they should.    I’m surprised more retailers haven’t stopped selling this edition at all. 

 I found the following Microsoft reponse to the issue. 

Microsoft Responds – We have identified that there are some instances of blemishes on discs as a result of the packaging of the Halo 3 Limited Edition. It is related only to the Halo 3 Limited Edition version of the game. This is a small fraction of the total number of Halo 3 games shipped and sold, and is a limited production version of the game. We are currently investigating the scope of this situation and notwithstanding the outcome of the investigation, we have implemented a plan to address it. We encourage anyone experiencing these issues to go to xbox.com/support and click on the Halo 3 Limited Edition disc replacement link. We will be replacing these discs and apologize for the inconvenience.

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.

“Is buy online/pick-up in the store (BOL/PUIS from here on out) the cross-channel activity with the highest ROI? The panel’s consensus: the ever-popular answer, “It depends.” It certainly can provide a solid ROI – despite fears of channel cannibalization, whether coming from stores or from online, BOL/PUIS actually offers growth opportunities. It captures online sales that would have been lost because the consumer needed it “right now.” It also is additive to in-store sales, as consumers coming into stores tend to purchase more than just the item they came in to pick up.”

I agree with these statements and they are all very valid.  I also think that it’s beyond the ROI you are able to measure directly in same store sales year over year.  It comes down to customer experience and the loyalty that the positive experience generates.  We know that 17% of store sales, about $400 billion, is currently influenced by online research.  Forrester predicts this to be over $1 trillion in the next 5 years.  As the reliance on information on the web continues to increase, customers will demand to be able to do business in whichever channel suites them at that particular time.  If a consumer is not able to achieve the experience they are looking for, their loyalty will go elsewhere. 

Currently, I’m fairly loyal to Amazon.com for books.  Most of the time, they provide the customer experience I am looking for.  They have a wide selection of books, ways of finding and recommending books I would like, but more importantly they have in depth reviews of the books that I generally find reliable.  At some point, Borders or Barnes & Noble or someone is going to obtain these same capabilities plus be able to allow me to get it the same day from my local store.  When that happens, my loyalty will shift, because I will be in control of which experience I want to have that day. 

Obviously this issue is much larger than BOL/PUIS.  It’s inventory visibility to know that I can pick it up in 2 of 4 stores in my general area.(predecessor to a sucessful BOL/PUIS implementation)  It’s also order on the web, return in store or order from the web, modify order at the call center, and then pick up in store.   

The key to all of these capabilities in Nikki’s last bullet:

What are the biggest implementation obstacles in implementing BOL/PUIS? There are two that I always get asked about. The first is around order management – what application should be the customer-facing order management system? Retailers have tried to adapt their merchandising order management, have tried to extend their POS special order capability, and have tried to build out their order capture front-end to serve this critical capability. The reality is, you need a system that is designed to be a customer-facing order management system, which is tightly integrated into order capture, POS, and fulfillment. Nothing else will work. If you don’t have a strong central OMS that can bridge online and in-store, you are going to drop the ball with your customers. “

I completely agree.