Shorter life cycles, time to market, product proliferations are some of the terms one associates with any product development across industries. A lot has been said, written and discussed and yet it leaves a room for further discussions. The basic question one asks is WHY?
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I am just flying back from attending the CGT (Consumer Goods Technology) Sales & Marketing Conference 2009. Overall the conference was surprisingly well attended and even more surprisingly upbeat. Infact I haven’t seen sales & marketing executives more upbeat about innovation and investments even in the boom times. Granted there was tacit acknowledgement about the economy but there was a certainty of the fact that recovery had begun. Coming from sales & marketing folks in the consumer products industry who handle some of the largest retail accounts all over the world, this is a great sign.
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In the early days of eCommerce development, the world was a simpler place. You created the user experience, configure the payment servers, set up the fulfillment channels, and turned it on. The browsers were fairly simple HTML rendering engines that took what you sent it and drew them on the screen. You could control the user experience by tuning your servers to deliver the resulting HTML quickly.
Fast forward to today. It is not unusual for a modern eCommerce site to use twenty-five or more third party sites. These sites help to satisfy both the non-functional and functional requirements. For example, an eCommerce site needs to know how many shopping carts are being abandoned, how many orders are being placed, how many pages are being accessed, how often certain pages are being viewed, etc. Enter Web Analytics vendors. You place a JavaScript snippet in your important pages and there you have it. Do you need to understand the detailed performance of your site’s pages? Just add more scripts that send data to a Web Performance Company. Do you want to provide consistent performance in spite of the geographical location of your customers; you need a content delivery network. Do you want to sell travel, conduct auctions, sell credit cards and gift cards? There are services for all of these.
One of the difficulties of being an online retailer is that consumers have a difficult time determining how the clothes will look and feel on their bodies. One of two things usually happens.
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The possibilities of using Loyalty Cards in multi-channel fashion are endless. It seems easy enough to sign-up or redeem points online. Just about everyone uses their card in store for discounts (Publix) or points accumulation (Best Buy.) Creating a seamless, multi-channel customer experience is a whole different story.
Believe it or not technology is the challenge in creating the customer experience. In order to keep your personalized offers, discounts, points balance, and arbitration synchronized retailers need real time access to such data. The use of credit cards, swipe cards, and chip cards offer different challenges to this synchronization. Chip cards can store the customer points balance but are expensive. Swipe cards and bard coded loyalty cards are commonplace but require real-time access to the points balance and customer balance. This is not easy as many retailers have grown through acquisition and have many stores that still operate stand alone (and not in real-time connection with the corporate network.)
