Multi-Channel Commerce & Retailing

A year ago it was all about green retailing, organic food, recycling, carbon footprint – Things have dramatically changed for online grocers in 12 months. The high street is considerably changing with a few well-known brands disappearing: Woolworths in the UK probably being the most famous example. In 2009 times will be even more difficult for grocers as the consumers mind is now focused on price and a lot of them are turning to value-focused chains instead of the traditional leaders (Tesco, Carrefour). For some retailers the credit crunch or recession is an opportunity to gain market shares, Poundland (the UK chain selling everything at a unique price: £1) is planning to open 35 stores in 2009 (200 stores currently) and Asda (the UK branch of Wal Mart) reported serving 1.3 million more customers than the previous year in the week leading up to December 25 but for most of them it will mean loss of revenue and market shares. While the most logical answer to this is to lower prices and offer better deals (buy one get one free etc…), I believe there are a few things online grocers could do to re-assure their customers on their price policy:

Continue reading "Online Grocers: Welcome to the price war!" »

Posted by Guillaume Vingtier at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I love to read predictions made at the beginning of the year and look back at those predictions at the end of the year in retrospect. Click here to take a look at what people were talking about web analytics at the beginning of this year.

As we approach end of the year 2008, I have put together a timeline representation below to give the readers a snapshot view of the key developments in the area of Web Analytics and the direction taken by key players in the industry in the past year. I have tried to provide references wherever possible but this post can be best received if you are familiar with the Web Analytics market dynamics.

(For the benefit of the readers the links for each of these announcements are provided at the end of this post)

Continue reading "Web Analytics – Year 2008 in Retrospection" »

Posted by Rockey Nebhwani at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

LinkedIn recently announced launch of its open application platform for others to develop social applications. (http://blogs.zdnet.com/social/?p=600). Out of those, the one which caught my attention was an application named as the “Reading List” developed by Amazon. Those, who haven’t seen this yet, would probably want to take a look at the Demo video on YouTube. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNlANI9juY8). However, if you think about this, this is not the first time somebody has developed an application like this on a social network.  So, you might be wondering as to what makes this one different?

Continue reading "Amazon & LinkedIn – Collaborative Prospects" »

Posted by Rockey Nebhwani at 05:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

If someone were to write a book called “Great eCommerce Site Launches in History”, the book would be very thin.  With few exceptions, the replacement of an existing eComm Platform with a new one is a wild ride filled with crashes, slow-downs, time-outs, and roll-backs.  In this post, I will discuss the source of these bad experiences, and how to improve the situation on your next project.

Early in the project, the team is focused on gathering the requirements, creating the customer experience and designing the back end connections to the legacy systems.  “Going live” seems safely in the distant future, and gets very little attention up front.  As a result, the deployment is handled by a team that is exhausted from the push to finish the coding on time.  Errors are made and sites crash.  Revenue is lost, managers are embarrassed, programmers are stressed out, etc.  There has to be a better way.

Continue reading "Going Live: A White-Knuckle Experience" »

Posted by Stephen Alan Potts at 09:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The global slowdown is clearly hitting consumers. Daily tales of restricted financing, foreclosures, and credit denial are all too frequent in the media. Yet, online channels seem to, if anything, be benefitting from this relative economic slowdown. In an article reviewing such changes in the Wall Street Journal (Nov.13th 08, "Net Gains" - Nikesh Arora, Google Snr VP, & Pres. EMEA) the indicators for self service and shopping online seemed to be tracking upwards as consumers look for value and cost reduction.

Continue reading "Credit Crunch - Crisis or Opportunity?" »

Posted by Billy Byatt at 01:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)