Multi-Channel Commerce & Retailing

Thinking About The Acquisition Funnel and Conversion Rates

2008-10-06T21:37:00Z

Conversion rates are often on the forefront of the mind when operating a website. In the simplest of models, increasing conversions can be lumped into those that increase the total number of visitors making it to the point of conversion and those that increase the conversion rate by increasing the probability that a visitor completes a transaction. Ideally you would like to increase both simultaneously. A useful way to look at and diagnose problems related to web conversions is through an acquisition funnel model. This is the first post in a series that will be discussing this model in the context of a generic eCommerce site.

The acquisition funnel model analyzes the macro behavior of visitors from the traffic drivers that brought them to the site up until to the transaction conformation page. The premise is that at each stage in the model is associated with a probability that the visitor will leave the site or effectively not complete a transaction. Thus the total conversion rate can be approximated by a multiplicative function whose variables are the individual probabilities of each stage in the funnel. Although this does assume independence between the events that caused the visitor to leave the site or abandon the transaction it overall offers a reasonable approximation.

The first stage of the acquisition funnel examines the relationship between traffic drivers and how effectively the website encourages visitors to stay on the site past the landing page. This critical step affects not only the total volume of visitors browsing further into the website but also is a direct factor in influencing the effectiveness or cost per visitor to the site.

An effective means of optimizing the cost per visitor and marketing spending is to link an individual traffic driver to the probability that a visitor will engage with the site. This probability is typically referred to as the “bounce” rate on a landing page. This allows one to correlate the effectiveness of a marketing campaign directly to the cost per click. It also can be fashioned into a marketing effectiveness dashboard to clearly denote which campaigns are working and bring attention to those that are not. Common reasons for high bounce rates typically include an inconsistent user experience and/or content that differs greatly from the users expectations when they clicked on the advertising link. Tracking a specific traffic driver all the way through conversion can also be useful to understand the quality of visitor that a specific traffic driver is bringing to the site.

In my next post, I will be discussing landing page optimization in the context of the acquisition funnel model.

Browsing Behavior

2008-10-05T19:07:59Z

Experts from digital agencies have, for quite a while, focused on the user experience as the core differentiator on-line. One-click purchasing has been the target for many on-line retailers since the concept was introduced by Amazon. While I agree with the importance of the user experience I wonder if there is too much hype around the utopian one-click concept.

My experience is that site visitors exhibit a range of e-commerce browsing behaviours depending on the site, its product range and their point in the purchasing cycle. I believe my premise applies to all retail e-commerce websites from music to banking and grocery to TVs.

My starting point is the nature of the product. Typically regular users of grocery and retail banking websites are task oriented; these users make regular visits and typically repeat transactions. Users are annoyed by web-experiences that divert them from their task and the nature of the task is very functional in nature. Features that streamline purchasing enhance the user experience; these include shopping lists, favourites and one-click checkout. Products such as clothing, consumer electronics and, to some extent white goods, are less frequent purchases and typically involve comparison shopping, such shopping often involves more than one website. On an initial visit users may browse through a product set to get ideas about which product to buy, on later visits they may have decided on a product and now return in order to buy; these websites therefore need to support multiple buying behaviours.

We can identify four browsing behaviours that a site should support:

Recreational: The visitor is looking for new ideas and opportunities.
Functional: A product type is in mind (for example a camera or a sofa) and the visitor is deciding which product to buy.
Pre-qualified: The visitor has a particular brand or model in mind and is looking for the best deal and delivery options across multiple vendors.
Surgical: The visitor is here to buy a specific product (probably having been to the site before). They may have been browsing a paper catalogue.

My argument is that a typical retail website must support all browsing behaviours because a single visitor may exhibit several browsing behaviours over time; no single route to purchasing will suffice.

Here are a few ideas about how a website should support these browsing behaviours:

Recreational: Employ sophisticated browsing, search and product promotional mechanisms. Guided navigation, advanced search and very creative and interactive user interfaces are key. I like the interactivity on furniture sites for example (take a look at www.boconcept.com).
Functional: Use commonly recognized terms in the navigation scheme. Surface content to as high a level as possible using product carousels and list best sellers to anonymous visitors. Provide buying guides and product information for the more complex products. RS Components has a massive product range and does a very good job of categorization and surfacing content in a browse/search interface (www.rs-online.com).
Pre-qualified: Enable users to browse by brand and product name perhaps using guided navigation techniques. If possible build a comparison capability (e.g. across multiple vendors), as a minimum make it easy for the visitor to return to buy. Visitors can browse by brand name at John Lewis and Bloomingdales for example (www.johnlewis.com / www.bloomingdales.com).
Surgical: Help the user to return to the same product easily; Lands End enables users to enter part numbers on the home page as a way of supporting the paper catalogue (www.landsend.com). You can also enter a part number into the search engine at Heals furniture store (www.heals.co.uk) and get to the specific product, although it is not clear from the web site that this is possible (someone in store told me about this feature).

Browsing behaviours are not a substitute for personas; I fully endorse the use of personas to develop and enhance the user experience. However I do recommend personas are created with visitor behaviour in mind and that page designs are tested for their ability to support all four browsing behaviours.

Welcome to the Goat Rodeo!

2008-10-03T20:22:56Z

In my travels and conversations with clients, I’m often excited about the high levels of interest I see in all things Web2.0 and Social Commerce. Corporate executives find themselves taking cues from their teenage offspring about what’s hot in this space, chatting to friends about these weird and wonderful behavioral creatures called Social Networks, and engaging on the web in ways they never have before just to keep up with the fast pace of industry developments.

Having said that, I’m struck by the fact that, despite all their excitement, very few people and companies actually have a meaningful strategy to employ the many powerful concepts these topics embody. As a result, they’re forced to give cagey responses to questions from superiors about how much to budget for Web2.0 and Social Commerce in the next year. It’s almost as though there’s a reluctance to experiment with the ideas because there’s no clear answer to where they should begin. Is a company blog the right place to start? Perhaps ratings & reviews are the way to go? Or maybe we should build a widget for Facebook? You get the point… lots of action but not a whole lot of strategy. Kinda like a goat rodeo…

Recently, I heard the folks from Forrester allude to this phenomenon as “approach avoidance” syndrome. You know, the “I should probably be doing something about this, but I’m not quite sure what, so I’ll just continue to dabble and perhaps one day I’ll wake up and it’ll all be crystal clear to me” approach. This isn’t a challenge unique to web2.0/social commerce, and I’m sure we can borrow countless examples from the history of emerging technologies to illustrate how disruptive technologies can put you into a strategic tailspin. But, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t address it.

So then, the question remains, isn’t it time for a simple, easy-to-apply framework for understanding the social commerce possibilities and defining the right strategy for your company? I think it is….

Stay tuned for my next blog, when I’ll break social commerce down into the handful of business models it supports, and discuss a simple approach to creating a meaningful social commerce strategy.

User Generated Requirements - Part II

2008-10-03T11:43:35Z

In the last post, we looked at how blogging could be used as a means of requirements elicitation for customer facing web sites. In this part of the post, we will extend the concept outlines in the first post and take a look at the specifics of how to blog for requirements.

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Float an idea

The start of any new business requirement is an idea – an idea that your customers, your business analysts or you may have. For a dotcom portal, when a new idea is conceived, it could be tested in waters by floating it on the official blog. This could be accompanied by providing freedom to provide a ‘Yay!’ or ‘Naah!’ vote buttons or by letting other users comment on it using the pure blogging mechanism. It is up to the business analyst to collect comments, analyze responses to ‘Yay!’ or ‘Naah!” float new threads to clear up the topic, if it was a little ambiguous.

Facilitate a Discussion

Floating an idea is just the first step. For any good, concrete requirement to be finalized, the idea needs to be brewed for a while. During this phase, the business analysts will need to make sure that they keep adding fuel to the fire, maintain the interest and activity while collecting useful information about the requirements along the way.

In certain cases, when the requirements are a little tricky or hard to visualize, it might make sense to put a small prototype out for the users to test drive and give their comments. These prototypes could range from non functional screen shots or visual drawings to a semi functional live application which demonstrates the concept and its uses. The business analyst would again have to track the user feedback – implicit (web analytics) & explicit (blogs) and shape up the requirements accordingly.

Collect & Rationalize Feedback

The last leg of this requirements gathering exercise deals with using the collected feedback to reflect on your system. The approach could vary based on your starting position – if you were planning a new release for your system with limited budget, then you’ll need to come up with an opening moves matrix the following:

The first three columns of this matrix are self explanatory – they talk about the categorization and cost of these requirements along with their brief description. The fourth and fifth columns specify the results from your blogs. The fourth one has a factor of Yay! to Naah! ratio, which implies that for every 100 users that said AJAX requirement should be implemented, 65 said, it should not be. The last column gives an idea about how many people participated in these discussions.

How to Interpret the Matrix

The factors that will decide which requirements should land up being part of your release will be dictated by the last three columns. The requirements that have a Yay! To Naah! ratio of more than one can become candidates for being shelved; unless the ratio is marginally above one and number of votes are extremely high. Such a spread indicates a 50-50 opinion and it can be left to the business sponsor or business analyst’s discretion to can or to go ahead with such a requirement. The low Y to N ratio requirements are the ones that the customers are holding their breath for, the ones that could provide your application an edge over others. These should be considered for development right away.

Other forms of Feedback

Besides the opinion votes, other valuable feedback can also be received from the user which can be used to refine the requirements. Let’s consider the Personalization requirement in the OMM matrix above which had a price tag of $800K for instance. Your original idea of personalization might have been to provide customizable themes and skins, a stock portlet and a weather portlet. From this blogging activity you may realize that most of the users do not feel that they will come to your portal for a stock and weather portlets. They would rather go to a specialized portal for these services. However, they are interested in the themes and skins functionality.

Although this feedback does not give you a go, no-go decision; it does you provide you an opportunity of trimming down your requirements and the associated cost before a single pence was expensed in its development. This kind of feedback can be crucial to keep your costs under control and effectiveness at an all time high.

Not a silver bullet!

It is prudent to mention at this point that this approach is only applicable for your functional requirements – not the non-functional ones. I can’t imagine a dotcom portal discussing its security and availability requirements on a public blog for obvious reasons. NFRs belong to different category and are best discussed and acted upon, internally. Besides, it will be difficult for your end users to understand, relate to or contribute to these requirements.

Support Mode

For most dotcom portals, the support service is offered through a toll free telephone number or through an email. Since both of these mediums need some effort and at times - hassle, they are usually employed only by users who have a problem. They inadvertently shoo away people who may have an idea for making things better. In today’s world, it is difficult to imagine customers picking up a phone to call in with their advice. Besides, the easier option for them is to hop on to an alternate portal which offers the functionality that they need in the manner that they want.

Now, let’s see what could get the users to speak their mind and why. First, the ‘how’ part – Instead of emailing their feedback, the users can post it on a blog on the portal. This has an implicit answer to the ‘why’ part embedded in it. By giving the users a platform to voice their opinion, you are also giving them an opportunity and a medium to get a social reaction to their opinion. I could write pages about why it is important and how it has worked in the past, but it will make more sense if you look at your favorite socialization website – orkut.com, facebook.com or what have you.

So, in the new world, our support service will also take shape of a blog – where users can list their problems, support staff can reply to queries, other users can respond to issues and users can rate the responses that they get. The beauty of this approach is that besides providing the support infrastructure, this medium automatically builds a knowledge base for the users that new users can search when they have a problem, other users can update and keep it up to date. Or in other words –knowledge base of the users, by the users and for the users.

Get the Balance Right

2008-09-21T08:34:11Z

It is with great relish that I join the list of talented bloggers who have preceded me and offer my humble contribution to the ongoing debate around multi-channel commerce (MCC). One of the first things which always strikes me when I am participating in debates around MCC or even customer discussions is while the focus is reassuringly on what MCC can accomplish and provide, inevitably the debate quickly becomes a one-sided focus on web capabilities. In a way this is understandable as the web has been the ‘ultimate solution’ to whatever problem or aspiration a company may have. Often times this is correct and the web truly does possess the power to revolutionize a business.]]> However, to put the focus solely on the web at the expense of all other channels – often the missing parts of MCC plans – is to run the risk of creating a new environment which suits the business but forgets one thing, who are the users and what is it they want to achieve? If the end customer normally transacts via telephone or is a user of SMS then important avenues are being dismissed which could in their own way offer a rounded and capable solution. So certainly focus on the attributes and capabilities of the web channel, the look and feel of the application you plan to launch but please, please, bear in mind the impacts on other established channels already in use by your customers, and consider carefully the implications of the new channel capabilities you are launching.

For example, often the very predictions of customers ‘switching’ channels without proper communication and incentives fall woefully short of their promise. If no equivalent planning has been made on how to align the two channels, then what inspired thinking will bridge the gap between expectation and reality? In such cases even the fundamentals can be ignored. How will a customer be handled if, in receiving a lack of sufficient clarity during a transaction, they revert back to the voice channel? How will their online history be presented to the agents in the call centre when they do call in? Will those same agents answering the call have any ability to impact on the process? And if not, could that status check be handled better by an automated announcement or better still a proactive contact via outbound dial or SMS? As a rule of thumb it is always better to provide the information a customer seeks proactively then to suffer the higher cost of an inbound voice contact and resulting customer frustration.

These are the issues which must be addressed to get the balance right, and prevent any new MCC initiative falling at the first hurdle. In this way new designs and applications can be more readily integrated into the existing channel hierarchy and prevent the feature rich deployment which, despite showing promise in its inception, proves a costly failure for an organisation who forgot it was the customer themselves they were building it for.

Over the coming months I hope to be able to offer some battle scars and insights and add to the fascinating content already on this blog.

User-Generated Requirements - Part I

2008-09-16T13:08:58Z

A few weeks ago, I was talking to a friend of mine who is employed with one of the leading web portals in the world. Besides discussing other things, our chat ventured into the realm of customers, how to work with them better and what has changed in requirement extraction in the recent days, etc. One thing lead to another and not long into the conversation, my friend threw in an interesting statement – “Its relatively easier for us, we have got just one customer – our own company”. There was something odd about this statement that was making it hard to digest but I could not pin point it for a few minutes. When my thoughts caught up with me, I replied –“Hmmm, instead of just one customer, shouldn’t the whole world be the customer for you? After all, your apps are used by the whole world and I am sure a lot of people out there have ideas of about how to make them better. How can a bunch of business analyst think on behalf of the whole world and draw requirements for you?”

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“Interesting, I didn’t look at it that way”, said my friend. “But let’s say for a second that I agree with you. How do you propose we go about collecting requirements from the whole wide world?” At this point, the consultant with in me rose to the occasion and said, “Blogs! You can collect your requirements from Blogs!” The conversation did not go much beyond “Yeah, right!” But later that week I gave it some more thought. Why can’t it be done, what could be the concerns, is it really that farfetched an idea? I am sure it has been done already by someone, somewhere.

In this post, I have tried to outline an approach on how to use discussion forums and blogs in a disciplined manner to extract user requirements. It will also throw some light on some projects that have already used this concept successfully. We will try to crystal gaze and see what common problems could surface when you try to knit blogging web into the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) cycle.

We will also extend the discussion to plant some thought about knowing our customer’s customers. We will look at how to help our customers reap the thoughts and ideas of their customers in order to build best of breed applications.

About Requirements

Some people hate them, some are obsessed by them and some abuse them, but none of us can ignore them. Requirements and scope are by far the most talked about subjects of the SDLC. Traditionally, requirements used to be extracted during the begining of the project, finalized and then brought to life through the remainder of the development cycle. A few decades ago, the realm of requirements changed first with the advent of iterative development and then with agile methodology. Iterative development gave the business a chance to build requirements in steps to have a better control on the end solution. With Agile methodology, the business analysts became part of the development team, validating and rehashing requirements for high risk project to keep bring some certainty into what they were going to get.

With Web 2.0’s advent, the stage is set to change yet again. Commercial portals these days are more aware of the need to meet the customer’s expectation and more importantly evolve with them. In this new world, it is quite hard to imagine having the same business analysts of 2003 era churning up requirements to stay competitive. Even with the best of the class business analysts, there are no guarantees that your number one portal will continue to remain number one. With traditional business analysts, the trend gradually leads to aping other portals rather than evolving with customers. The businesses can either start employing some psychics to read the customer’s mind and help them retain the number one slot or start asking the customers what they want. For my money, I will wager my bet on the latter.

Requirements & SDLC

Let’s us refresh our concept of SDLC as it applies to a dotcom, before we move further. Irrespective of what methodology is applied in a project, it will go through at least four main phases.

Figure 1 – SDLC Phases

This contextualized depiction of SDLC phases adds another phase – support for dotcom portals. The inception phase is primarily anchored by the business sponsors to make a case for what is needed and why. Traditionally, requirements are extracted in the elaboration phase, before the construction begins. The other phases are used for implementing the requirements as intended, validating it and then supporting your customers in using what you developed.

For a dotcom portal, the case is little different. Most of these portals are not built to solve a business problem. In this world, the more appropriate SDLC would be:

Figure 2 – New Generation Requirements Gathering

For this life cycle, I have separated the requirement gathering into three phases to communicate the idea. They could also be clubbed as three different activities in one phase. In addition, I have added another phase called “monitoring” which will run in parallel with the support phase to ensure that the delivered functionality is actually being used. The three new requirement activities are:

Float an Idea
Facilitate Discussion
Collect & Rationalize Feedback

These phases are the ones where a collaboration utility like blogs or discussion forums could be employed really effectively. In the new world, when a dotcom portal is launched, it will also have a blogging facility for all its users. They can start a new thread here, post comments to existing posts, etc. And here is the twist, along with all your end users, these blogs will also be used by your business analysts. The new age business analysts will be responsible for floating new ideas, collecting user comments, rationalizing the collected data, take the most sought after features to the drawing board. These blogs will also act as the launching pad for releasing new features and soliciting feedback.

In the next few parts of this post, we will take a look at how blogs can be effectively employed to collect requirements.

Your Site's Performance

2008-09-15T18:42:57Z

It is finished. After months of working weekends, you are finally ready to go live. The bug list is now short and manageable. You have done your performance testing and you are good to go. You go live with the redesigned site, breathe a sigh of relief and book tickets to the Caribbean. Then something happens. Support calls are spiking. It seems that your customers are complaining about the speed of the new site. The calls are coming mainly from customers in Ontario and in Florida. Your boss has been called in to the CEO’s office and gotten chewed out. He comes to see you with a stressed-out look on his face. He isn’t yelling but …

]]> You tell your spouse to cancel the vacation. You rollback to the old site and you tell the staff that you guys are working the weekend again. You put your head in your hands and ask yourself, “What could I do more than I have already done? I spent four weeks on the performance tuning. Every one of our load tests showed that 99% of the simulated customers had sub-three-second response time. And now I look like a moron.”
Our development manager friend has made a classic error: he was not sufficiently paranoid. He trusted a simulation that was not worthy of his trust. Every simulation deviates from reality some. If that deviation is small, then the simulated result will be a good predictor. If that deviation is too great, then the result is garbage. Our manager should have asked himself a set of questions before declaring that the new version of the software was good to go live:
·         How many simultaneous customers are we simulating? Is this number correct?
·         What hardware are we testing on? Is it representative of the live site?
·         What other processes take place on the live site that aren’t present on the test platform?
·         What are we testing? Is the ratio of tests that we are running a true indication of what we will see when we go live?
·         Where are we testing from? If our test is within our own firewall, then we will not be simulating what the end users will see.
·         Are our tests from a single geography? Every region has its own network characteristics and its own set of ISPs.
A good performance test must be accurate enough to cover the risk to your revenue stream and your brand. An experimental eCommerce site that sells no-name closeouts can temporarily afford to give the user a shaky experience. An upscale brand that sells $1B US/ year cannot. In the second case, great performance testing rigor must be instituted. This rigor involves doing the following:
·       Create a set of test cases that accurately reflect the mix of activities that the site will experience on a daily basis, especially during peaks. This requires a careful analysis of the web analytics data and the creation of a transactional load profile. This load profile can then be used to add additional test cases and to set the frequency at which they are run.
·       Move the test outside the firewall. Ideally, move the performance test close to where your users are. If you test in Atlanta, how will you know if you are getting good response time in Canada? Do you sell in Europe? California? This higher the risks the more elaborate the testing has to be.
·       Test on multiple browsers. Which browsers are most of your customers running on? How does that affect your response times? A whole new set of browsers from Microsoft, Google, and others has just been released. They have a new set of performance characteristics that differ from the old browsers. You must test on every browser that can impact your performance.
·      Test on multiple connection types. What types of connections do you customers use? If 50% of your revenue comes from dial-up in the Northeast, then you need to know what they will experience before rolling it out to them.
Andrew Grove chose “Only the Paranoid Survive” as the title of his famous book on business advice. We, as software development professionals, would do well to remember that.

Next Generation SEO trends

2008-09-02T15:44:57Z

Before I write anything about Next Generation SEO trends, let me explain what I mean by next generation SEO. My idea of next generation SEO is something similar to a car in cruise mode or a plane in auto pilot mode where minimum intervention from driver or pilot is needed. Next Generation SEO is a self healing system which is enriched by numerous data sources and intelligence using which it will keep improving itself. Currently there are lot of analysis tasks which are required on continous basis to keep improving ranking of your web pages. Analysis tasks generally includes Seasonal keyword trends, Keyword research etc. for SEO optimization. Next geneartion SEO systems will be able to automate much of this and build a self improving SEO datamart.

]]> I am a big bollywood fan so first example is from Bollywood. And before I proceed, let me disclose that I am big fan of Shahrukh khan (He is a bollywood actor). Those who don't know Shahrukh Khan, I strongly recommend reading about Shahukh on Wikipedia and watch few bolloywood movies :-)

Recently I was looking to buy a book which was written on Shahrukh Khan but I couldn't recall the name so I decided to search for the book on Google and searched for "book on shahrukh khan". (http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=book+on+shahrukh+khan&meta=)

Though I got book results from Amazon but that made me think that what other Shahrukh fan might search if they are in similar situation as me. For those who don't know Shahrukh is also known as SRK (Stands for Shah Rukh Khan) and King Khan. I decided to look at the customer behavior and see there are any trends which exists here. Another google tool to my rescue this time and I looked for trends for terms SRK, Shahrukh Khan and King Khan on google trends. (http://www.google.com/trends?q=SRK%2C+Shahrukh+Khan%2C+King+Khan)

This is very evident from this graph that in recent years term "SRK" is gaining momentum as a search keyword on search engines whereas queries for term "King Khan" are still very limited. This brings a important point if somehow there is a intelligent way to co-relate SRK with Shahrukh Khan or King Khan, you can optimize your web pages for term "SRK". More importantly, you can atleast include these related terms in descriptive URLs for the product detail page.

Anybody who has observed SEO efforts of big e-retailers in recent years can easily figure out that descriptive URLs for product detail pages are constructed using a algorithm which takes product title as input (Check URLs for Amazon results in google in first screen shot in this post) and if this co-relation can be built into the algorithm, output will definitely will be more fruitful for SEO efforts.

But millon dollar question here is that how IT systems can figure out this co-relation between various terms. Remember the data soruces which I mentioned while defining Next Generation SEO systems? Those numerous data sources will be the key to build system intelligence. Next question is that what those data sources might be...we still need to figure out. I attempted to look for the data source which we can use for building SEO intelligence. Here are some of those data soruces:-

1) Wikipedia can serve as a valuable data source here. Wikipedia entry for Shahrukh Khan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahrukh_Khan) can definitely help in this particular case and to my surprise wikipedia knew that these three terms are co-related (Check Other Names section).

2) In my search for additional data sources, I landed on Amazon.com. It's a hidden treaure for customer insights in my opinion, hence I tried to give it a shot for this research. Amazon "related searches" feature can provide valuable insight here. Though, in case of "Shahrukh Khan" amazon didn't suggest SRK or King Khan to me but I am sure some day Amazon's system will learn this and will be able to provide this insight as well. Or Otherwise, by community contributions like "Amazon tag for Search" (https://www.amazon.com/gp/associations/wizard.html?ie=UTF8&ref%5F=s9%5Frk%5Fdpcs%5Fwiz&asin=0446578584), I expect Amazon systems to build that intelligence some day...and here you go...we got another data source to feed into our SEO data mart.

3) Another data source may be insight which you get from your Web Analytics tools like Omniture, Web Trends etc. You can always feed Search term report from analytics tools to SEO data sources and that might result in some useful trends. (You probably want to get a customize search term report like "Common search terms used by various customers who ended up buying same product"). With this additional data point, next generation SEO Data Mart can gain some further insights on consumer behavior when it comes to searching.

4) Further search for data sources takes me back to another google product. This time it was recently launched "Google Insights for Search". Google insights showed me a clear pattern for regional interest in these terms. (http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=&q=SRK%2C%20Shahrukh%20Khan%2C%20King%20Khan&geo=&date=&clp=&cmpt=q)

With this it's clear that in Finland and Switzerland, people search for Shahrukh with term "SRK" rather than searching for "Shahrukh". With this comes the concept of GeoMarketing SEO URLs. Now it makes sense to focus your efforts for optimize your pages for term "SRK" in Finland and Switzerland and for "Shahrukh Khan" in rest of the world.

Now to digress from Bollywood here, if you take the example of newly launched Canon 1000D Camera (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_EOS_1000D). This particular model is known as EOS Kiss in Japan and EOS Rebel in United States. If you compare the search traffic for these two terms (EOS Kiss Vs EOS Rebel) in google trends (http://www.google.com/trends?q=EOS+Kiss%2C+EOS+Rebel&ctab=0&geo=all&date=2008&sort=0), it clearly shows that traffic for EOS Rebel is significantly higher compare to EOS Kiss.

But regional data reveals some interesting facts here again.... Search pattern for these two terms is exactly opposite in Asian countries compared to Europe and United States. This data can serve as a very useful insight in coming up with Geo-Optimized SEO URLs.

We will see more and more data sources or services which will provide ecosystem for Next Generation SEO and obviously building a system like this will have it's own challenges. Lot of research is still required in order to come up with a robust system which can consume all these data and provide insights using this data. This may require a significant investment in technology which probably only big players will be able to afford. Small players will have to wait and watch if this works or not.

I will be looking for more and more data sources in future to support this theory. Meanwhile feel free to comment on this post if you have interesting thoughts or ideas.....

Thanks for reading.

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

2008-08-25T04:12:53Z

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?

]]> It seems that the technology is there. There are plenty of companies applying it to various industries, such as Mitek (financial services), Copper Range (construction), Nokia (which recently acquired Pixto, inventor of a generic image recognition app for mobile phones), and even freeware from ScanLife, which is available through Apple’s iTunes. And there are, of course, numerous PDA extension bar code scanners, some of which we’ve seen our retail clients evaluating, and most of which are cumbersome and expensive.

But what I’m thinking is, with all of these available technologies, who will be first to market with barcode scanning software that integrates with cellphone (and/or PDA) cameras, allowing customers to interact directly with the retailer? This experience could entail, at a most basic level, pointing your camera phone at a product’s barcode, sending an MMS to a number supplied by the retailer, and getting back information like detailed product specs/information or inventory for a certain size/variation. Go beyond the basic and allow simple online (or even SMS based) ordering and payment—or integrate it all into a package that figures out what’s going on when the software recognizes a barcode, and automatically takes the user to a webpage with product and purchase info. Such a scheme could really augment the “buy from any store with no shipping costs” (of which I’m a big fan) policy of retailers like Nordstrom.

I think the ultimate value (for consumers and smart webcos, anyway) of this technology would come from shopping aggregators (like say google product search, né froogle) to provide a mechanism to allow shoppers to scan a product barcode in a bricks and mortar store, send it to the aggregator, and receive back the best deals on that product. This of course assumes that the aggregator doesn’t mind the risk of alienating the physical retailer…but that makes me think maybe the future of bricks and mortar doesn’t so much lie in our traditional notion of a retailer-branded physical shopping experience, but perhaps in the concept of a product-brand-centric—or online aggregator centric—storefront where shoppers go to touch, feel, and/or try on stuff they want to buy, and then find the best deals online using the internet and the input device in their pocket.

And of course there’s room for less radical approaches, wherein, for example:

- a traditional retailer sets up such a system—perhaps as a premium service with a fee—and offers to match the prices found online, or to provide instant pick up at the physical store the customer’s shopping in, for a premium over the cheapest online price (solving the inventory-related issues associated with these approaches is left as an exercise for the retailer:^)

- a mall owner or other third party sets up such a system, inviting a limited set of retailers to opt-in, and providing a suite of tools (perhaps for a fee) to deal with the price-competition and inventory issues that may arise (e.g. query-specific promotions and/or substitute/cross-sell/up-sell options)

As always, I’m interested in your feedback on these ideas.

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

2008-08-06T20:37:38Z

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!

]]> What is a visual search? I believe that you can split visual search into three categories:

Searching for an image through keyword - a la Google
Searching through keyword but displaying the results more visually
Searching through visual components to find what you are looking for.

The first one is now pretty basic and most of us do that quite often. The second is starting to be interesting as most websites are still failing on this but a few good examples are now available. Look at Search Me for example (http://www.searchme.com/), they had this clever idea of presenting results in a fashion where you could see the actual page before selecting the results you want to see. So I can then quickly scan the results and select the one I am interested in. A bit better than just displaying the first few lines of a web page or a thumbnail of a product…

I am not quite sure that the Search Me model can be easily replicated for an e-commerce website though, but let’s now have a look at Oskope (http://www.oskope.com/). They let you choose how you want to display the results of your search so it is a bit more convenient for me to navigate through them. Analysing the results is a bit easier as you can see on this graph view, the experience is no longer flat but the best is still to come!
What is better then? Well actually I believe the capability to search with visual components as an input has a great future. Why? Because describing something is always an issue. Most of the words are inaccurate and translation is quite difficult - try to explain the difference between purple and lilac for example. So if I can just give a picture of something I like as an input there is a good chance that the results will suit me better (assumption being that the results are relevant). It is easier said than done, but I have noticed a few recent good things. Like.com (http://www.like.com/) have been one the first to offer a visual search feature where you can select a visual detail of a product that you like and try to find matching ones based on colour and/or shape. Etsy (http://www.etsy.com/) have created a really inspirational browsing experience in enabling a search where you can choose a colour through an actual rainbow. A bit sexier than searching with a keyword!

But I think the real thing is still to be invented. Imagine a world where you could browse the internet, see a product that you like, right-click on the image, launch the search and then see a search results page where you could compare prices across the internet with no language barrier. It will be pretty cool and useful – I guess it could also be quite depressing for people like me based in the UK where almost everything is more expensive than anywhere else! It could sound a bit futuristic, but I think we are not so far away from it. I tested this afternoon the TinEye browser plugin (http://tineye.com/) for the first time and I have been quite impressed. Basically I am now able to search the entire internet through a right-click on an image. So who will be the first to build a comparative engine based on this?

Green with Intimacy

2008-08-04T01:04:21Z

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?

]]> The first answer that comes to mind for me is: gather and analyze customer intimacy data concerning how long the customer has had his/her phone, how many new features he/she might be missing, what he/she uses his/her phone for…and then to target them with SMS, MMS, voice, or web solicitations intended to appeal to their propensity for technology change vs. the age/functionality of their phone.

But here are some other ideas that come to mind:

- Could Recellular partner with a battery company to incorporate technology that detected when a battery is nearing the end of its life (who among us hasn’t had to figure that out the old-fashioned way?), and somehow (calendar message, SMS) triggered a message to the user?

- Could Recellular partner with service providers or cell phone companies to send SMS, MMS, or internet-based reminders to customers whose phones are close to reaching the end of their lifespans, perhaps based on the customer’s known usage patterns, travel patterns, or other behavioral data (if the service provider is willing to provide it…)?

- Could Recellular combine customer behavior intimacy with location awareness (perhaps through a custom, co-branded hardware component) to suggest to green-minded customers green-related things to do? Or drop off points when it was time to recycle a cell phone or battery? Or for that matter, any other recyclable thing?

- Could Recellular partner with a philanthropic organization to leverage any of the above technologies to allow cell phone users to benefit causes significant to them through simply recycling electronics?

- Could Recellular partner with both a philanthropic organization and a cell carrier to provide benefit to both parties PLUS to the customer in the form of some sort of incentive?

All of these ideas have their pros, cons, and practical/technical limitations. Again, I’d love to hear your feedback on any of these or anything else that comes to mind.

Can you direct me to E Commerce Street?

2008-07-19T02:49:49Z

I was recently going through some old digital photos and came across the following I thought readers of this forum might get a kick out of:

]]> I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit, even looking at the data embedded in the jpeg, I can’t figure out where I took this thing. I think it was somewhere in central TX where I live.

Which I’d like to say got me thinking about Multi-Channel Commerce, but instead it made me remember a recent article I read on Eye-Fi, which brings interesting value-add technologies to plain ol’ SD cards. They now offer the Eye-Fi Explore card that, by triangulating wi-fi signals which the company has meticulously mapped (read some of the articles at http://www.eye.fi/news/reviews-awards/ to get a better idea of how this works than I can present here), imprints every photo with the approximate location at which it was taken. THAT would allow me to figure out where I found E Commerce street!

And THAT got me thinking about multi-channel commerce in a whole new way. Perhaps our traditional channel paradigm needs to change from the old medium-based framework of bricks & mortar, online, direct, etc. to a different frame of reference.

The Eye-Fi card, of course, got me thinking that location would be one component of this new framework…but as we all know, a one-dimensional framework is somewhat unappealing. So I had to find other components. If this new paradigm can be summarized as a graph (as all good paradigms can), what are its axes?

I have a notion that at least one of them is somehow related to proximity, or perhaps intimacy, yielding two axes:

Location: as technology improves, marketers gain better and better information about where you are, which they can then use to target you by the most appropriate channel based on this knowledge.
Intimacy: this could be a big axis, or several. I’m using “Intimacy” to indicate a category that contains some superset of:

What is the time: the timing of the interaction is relevant on every conceivable level: the year, the season, the month, week, day, hour, minute.
What you are doing: are you on a lunch break from work? Driving to the country for a weekend with the family? In an unfamiliar location?
Who you are: what are your demographics? Health concerns? Hobbies? Profession? Interests? Tastes? Pulse/blood pressure/other easy-to-measure-and-transmit vital stats at this particular moment?
How well do we know you: how much data on the above points (or any others related to intimacy) do we have? How about location data? How reliable is all of this?

As technology improves, it’s inevitable that marketers and sellers will get better and better information about their prospects’ and customers’ intimacy axis as well. As the accuracy of this information improves, and the technology delivering it becomes more ubiquitous, maybe we’ll finally see the long-predicted debut of the location-dependent lunchtime fast-food SMS coupon.

But I’d like to ask you to help me think outside the box about how the combination of location and intimacy—together with their lower-level facilitating technologies, like wi-fi, wi-max, GPS, SMS/MMS, digital imaging, character recognition, customer data management, artificial intelligence, and increasingly robust mobile web access devices—will impact our thinking about channels going forward. Beside the $.50 off hamburger coupons that might pop up as you stroll past a MacDonald’s at noon, what else should we look forward to? Some thought starters:

- Product, price, placement, and promotion—besides the hamburger coupon, how can location and intimacy knowledge be leveraged to improve the classic 4Ps? If I as a marketer know where you are and something about what your tastes are, how does that influence the products I promote to you and how I position them?

- Data input—Remember, in addition to facilitating voice and text communication, most cellphones now contain cameras and MMS capability. How can this feature be used to drive interactivity between marketer and buyer? Think about technologies like OCR, barcode recognition, and automated language translation.

- Social networking—how might marketers use location awareness, imaging/sms, mobile data input/send capabilities, and ubiquitous internet connectivity to encourage social networks in a way that both improves the customer experience and increases the bottom line?

- Ethics—on a recent trip to the UK, my mobile provider figured out that I was there and SMS’d me a message about my roaming rates. I don’t remember opting in for this kind of message, but I was happy to receive it. What kinds of communications, under what kinds of circumstances, is it ethical for a marketer to push (unsolicited) to a shopper by leveraging the technologies we’re discussing?

- Feasibility—From a technology standpoint, how feasible are these Big Ideas? How long will we have to wait for the software and hardware necessary to realize them?

I’d love to hear your feedback—especially if you have axes to add to (or grind into:^) the framework!

One page check-out and perpetual shopping cart: an opportunity not to be missed!

2008-07-03T20:56:54Z

Imagine a world where more than a third of the visitors of a store would start their shopping and fill their trolley and then, all of a sudden, leave the store with all these baskets lying on the floor. It looks more like science-fiction that anything else, but unfortunately for online retailers this is still the daily routine: according to a recent report from Jupiter Research only 64% of shopping carts filled on a site will result in a purchase!

]]> This could be explained by a variety of reasons: people use their shopping baskets to compare prices, are afraid to give their credit card information online or hidden delivery charges. But one sure thing is that online retailers are still struggling to design check-out processes which are truly engaging and intuitive. The typical check-out process will consist of 3 to 4 different pages (with a progress bar in the best case scenario) where I am likely to loose sight of my shopping basket and forced to register to order. These sorts of processes have not been designed with the customer in mind and are clearly creating a negative experience which will result in a poor brand perception.

Online retailers should stop reinventing the wheel and simply look at what customers do in the brick and mortar world. In the real world I see my basket all the way from the start of my shopping experience to check-out and I can add or remove products until payment – the till being a really good place for selling other goods like chewing gums or TV magazines (cross-selling) and I do not have to register for a loyalty card prior checking out. So why is the vast majority of the websites not just designed like this? Two main reasons:

Rich Internet Applications (RIA) are still considered as gadgets or nice to have by online retailers
Lack of customer centricity with usability testing and personas definition skipped and IT or Marketing defining the requirements.

A few online retailers have already understood that, done their homework and as a result they are setting new standards across the web with painless one page check-out processes and perpetual shopping baskets. Reebok, Nike, Gap (see picture below) or Anthropologie (again see picture below) can be identified as pioneers in this area and the good news is that customers are rewarding them for that! Anthropologie claimed for example an increase of 24% of their shopping basket conversion after implementing their new check-out process.

It is clear that online retailers not following this trend will not address key consumers needs (perpetual shopping baskets and one page check-out are generally rated as more important than toll free number or live help) and will continue to leave money on the table in the process. Can they really afford it?

Assortment & ranging in a multichannel context

2008-06-23T15:28:41Z

Multichannel retailers are confronted with the challenge of assortment and ranging across their online and offline channels. What's the overlap between the merchandise mix offered online vs in the stores? There are signficant implications to the merchandising decisions because it affects the customer experience, synergy between what the consumer sees online and finds in the stores, the cross-channel capabilities that allow customers to buy merchandise online from store inventory etc. These are not easy decisions and affect issues that transcend people roles, responsibilities, metrics, business processes and technology integration.

Flying Blind

2008-06-18T20:38:21Z

I am often called upon to review a design. The first things that I ask for are the performance goals and the scaling assumptions, often called the Load Model. More than half the time, they don’t exist, or they are pure fantasy. (I have heard business types specify sub-second response and infinite scalability.) The Load Model tells us how many transactions, page hits, orders, etc. a system will be experiencing per unit of time for a certain number of years in the future, often the next 5 years. This table or graph will determine the type of design that you have to create. Without it you are “Flying Blind”. For example, if you are told that you will have 45 orders per hour at peak then you have any number of ways that a system could be built. In fact, almost any design can handle such a light load. On the other hand, if you are told that you will have 45,000 order per hour you will have to examine every aspect of the design to detect bottlenecks as quickly as possible. Many times, no one really knows what the load numbers will be. Often, the business people will try to pawn the estimation off on the technical people. Resist this! You must make the business people take the bottom line for this. If you don’t, you will be accepting the risk that the business people are paid to accept. If you create the Load Model yourself, you will be ultimately responsible for its correctness. This is especially important when the load is unknowable. In that case, the business must pick a number out of the air. Once picked, you should ensure that everyone agrees to design to it. Later, if your approach is correct for the assumed load, but incorrect for the actual load, you will be able to defend the design.