Designing the next generation customer experience in multi-channel retailing

August 25, 2008

Is that a Mobile Point of Sale input device in your pocket?

I’ve been intrigued lately (okay, more intrigued than usual) by the notion of how advances in the adoption by retailers of the mobile channel will eventually come into play in the physical world of bricks and mortar retailers.

There is, of course, the whole notion of simply promoting online shopping via internet-enabled mobile devices, but that’s so, I dunno…web 1.5.

There’s also the innovation we’re seeing from firms like Sears, which allows customers to use in-store kiosks (provided by Tyco Electronics). Which, don’t get me wrong, is a step in the right direction.

Perhaps closest to what I’m talking about are consumer-targeted MPOS (Mobile Point of Sale) devices like the Motorola Sparrow.             

Which are great, but I’m thinking more about that mobile device in my pocket, which, for most mobile-enabled consumers in the US and Europe today, includes not only communication features, but a camera. Why not use this capability as an input device?

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Posted by Vince Cavasin at 04:12 AM | | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

August 06, 2008

E-commerce: is that time to invest in visual search?

Why do people shop online? Because it is easier to compare prices online (and so find a good bargain), search for information, convenient and quicker. That’s why search engine and comparators are so popular. Considering that - it is always with surprise that I notice how little e-tailers are investing in search technologies. Try to search for a blue shirt size 15 on a website and it is a safe bet to say that most results won’t meet your expectations. Most e-tailers will blame their search engine for this but it is likely that they do not even have people looking after their search engine on a daily basis. That’s a shame as search is probably the most used feature on a website therefore a good search engine is a quick way to stand out from the crowd! How? The first thing to do is obviously to get the basics right in indexing your attributes and make sure they are normalised, the second thing will be to start playing with the relevancy algorithm and look after your search reports (I won’t detail that here) and the third one will be to innovate. How? Visual search!

 

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Posted by Guillaume Vingtier at 08:37 PM | | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

August 04, 2008

Green with Intimacy

For this post, I’d like to get a little more concrete on the potential of using the new channel framework to analyze & optimize a marketer/seller-customer relationship.

 

One company I like that deals with a potential retail “channel” in many different ways is Recellular.com. Recellular is in the perhaps unglamorous but important business of "electronics sustainability"--they work to keep the millions of cellphones, PDAs, and related accessories that get replaced annually out of landfills. How might they adopt our framework?

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Posted by Vince Cavasin at 01:04 AM | | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)