No Turn On Red

Last year, Target announced that they would be ending their relationship with Amazon and bringing their e-commerce operations in-house. I only assume that many e-commerce platforms and integration partners were courting the large retailer, touting their services. Yesterday, the retailer announced the full list of vendors that will be involved in the nearly 2 year project:

• Sapient Corp., based in Boston, as the lead partner and integrator,
• International Business Machines Corp., based in Armon, NY, which will provide the multichannel e-commerce platform,
• Oracle, based in Redwood City, Calif., which will provide the database platform,
• Endeca Technologies Inc., based in Cambridge, Mass., which will provide search and navigation functionality,
• Autonomy Corp., based in San Francisco, which will provide content and digital asset-management functionality,
• Sterling Commerce Inc., Dublin, Ohio, which will provide global inventory visibility and cross-channel order-management functionality, and
• Huge Inc.,based in Brooklyn, NY, will provide visual and interaction design.

This is going to be an interesting project to watch and I can’t wait to see what Target and their vendors come up with. A highly visible, successful brand that is already known for a pleasant in-store shopping experience will have a very high bar to meet as re-platform their e-commerce offering.

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Augmented reality is one of the biggest buzzwords right now and people are looking for ways to bring this technology to every industry. As much as I love e-commerce, there is still a (purposeful) disconnect from the brick and mortar shopping experience, especially with apparel. I feel that when technology can bridge this gap, e-commerce sales can only grow as shoppers continue to turn online. Augmented reality is one of the technologies that, when used effectively, could do a lot to bridge this disconnect.

One of the coolest demos that I saw at this year’s shop.org was the augmented reality dressing room tool that was developed by Zugara in partnership with Richrelevance. This tool allows shoppers to “virtually” try on clothes, put together outfits, and share these items with their friends on Facebook. This is all made possible through the use of Flash, a web cam, and hand gestures from the shopper. Really awesome stuff.

This week, Zugara and Richrelevance have announced that this technology has been brought to online boutique Tobi.com. Through the application, called Fashionista, shoppers can now shop the catalog using their web cam and interact with their friends. It’s really great to see this technology go live.

How are shoppers going to react? Tough to say. This is still emerging technology but with a very long life cycle ahead of it. Augmented reality may just be entering the e-commerce arena, but expect many more of these applications in the future. For now, the Fashionista application is a great first step in implementing augmented reality in e-commerce. I can’t wait to see this app grow.

I’ve embedded a video, below, showing the Zugara demo at the Richrelevance booth from shop.org. Above is a screenshot showing the application being used on Tobi.com.

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Adobe, makers of Photoshop, Flash, and other software that doesn’t get paid for as often as it should, has announced that they are purchasing website analytics and optimization company Omniture in a deal worth 1.8 billion dollars.

This is a huge deal for the e-commerce industry and not just for what it means for Adobe today. This is a huge deal for the type of company Adobe can now position itself as and for where they could potentially be in 18 months.

First, realize that Omniture is not just an analytics company. Sure, that may be what they are known for – but they have many components of their software suite that work seamlessly with each other. Omniture also does merchandising, recommendations, website testing, and site survey – all tasks that are analytic driven. Many of these components are used by e-commerce retailers and I know several retailers that love their packages.

Second, realize that Adobe has already stepped into the e-commerce world when they acquired Scene7 in 2007. Scene7 is a fantastic solution for managing images for retailers. (I’m not rehashing some Adobe marketing, I’m speaking as a developer who’s used Scene7 – I really like this software). Scene7 is now used by many, many retailers around the world to dynamically serve their images.

Short term I’d expect some sort of analytics package being applied to Scene7. I’m not sure what type of analytics you’d see, but I’m sure there are metrics that can be applied. If there are metrics available, there is a marketing person who will want to analyze them.

Longer term, I think it would be killer if there was an e-commerce platform that offered seamless integration with Omniture analytics and Scene7 image hosting. Of course Adobe isn’t an e-commerce platform, but not for long. I don’t think we will see 2010 come and go without a major, major acquisition by Adobe of an e-commerce platform. I think it would make perfect sense for Adobe to grow in this world. The industry has so much growth potential and Adobe could be perfectly situated to take advantage of this. It’s almost a no brainer to me.

I have my own ideas in my head of who I think Adobe could acquire, but I will keep them to myself right now. Let’s just say, that any e-commerce platform offering an ondemand SAAS solution would be the type of company I would think Adobe would gobble up.

The next 18 months are going to be very interesting in the e-commerce world.

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Earlier this year, Magento released the Enterprise Edition of their e-commerce platform. While reading up on their integration solutions, I couldn’t help but notice some interesting numbers as part of their partner program.

Integration partners who are at the Enterprise Level must have an $8,000 partner fee and provide Varien (parent company of Magento) with a revenue commitment of $100,000. This may be in enterprise licenses or “other Varien services”. A quick glance at the Magento partners page shows that there are currently 22 Enterprise partners. For a second, let’s consider what these numbers mean if we take them at face value.

This means that Magento is seeing revenues of $176,000 in just Enterprise partners alone (this doesn’t take into considering the $4,500 & $1,500 partner fees for the Professional and Community partnership levels). 22 Enterprise partners means that Varien has $2,200,000 in revenue commitments for the year. At an average deployment cost of $11,125 (according to Magento’s own figures), Enterprise partners must move 197 enterprise licenses this year to meet their commitments.

I know that my math is fuzzy and put together using the information that is publically available. I know that these numbers don’t take into account “other Varien services”. I also know that Varien is a private company with private sales figures. However, I am really interested to hear what others think: can Magento, the quickly growing e-commerce platform, actually see 200 enterprise edition licenses in their first year of offering their Enterprise Edition?

Going one step further and assuming that the average Enterprise Edition customer launches with two production licenses (number completely made up in my head), Magento is still looking at 100 clients. No wonder they are making so much noise in the e-commerce field right now.

So what do you think? Are these numbers, taken for what they are worth, realistically achievable for this e-commerce platform? Or, considering the growth that the platform saw over the past year, are these numbers the low end of what Magento could launch?

(Of course, my numbers could be really off as well. As I said, this is all fuzzy math and estimates. If you feel I’m off base in these assumtpions, please tell me!)

Did you find this post helpful? Then, you should also view these posts:

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Few things on my radar this morning that I want to share:

Great post by Get Elastic that analyzes the checkout login process of several of the top converting sites. New users resist registering and want to check out without creating an account. Very good data and thoughts there for anyone working in e-commerce.

Not all the news about the retail industry should be bad. Seeking Alpha has a list of 10 retailers with stronger than expected first quarter sales. A slight glimmer of positive news in the midst of all the doom and gloom about the economy that is still lingering.

For the designers in the house, I really love going through the sites at Design Meltdown. Always an inspirational gallery site. Last week they posted a new collection of “super clean” websites. Just because the design is clean doesn’t mean it has to be bland. Good inspiration there.

Jeremiah Owyang is live blogging from the Corporate Social Networking Conference in Amsterdam and has a recap of the panel on digital natives. Kids born after 1980, who grew up with the level of technology, should be looked at differently by businesses and brands. This is an important segment of consumers that retailers have to be aware of and cater to. Teen retailers have been forced to get it, but how will retailers react as this generation continues to grow older?

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Valentine’s Day is just a few days away. I wanted to see how various retailers are promoting the holiday in order to see how they are working to increase last minute sales. Below you’ll see screenshots of various e-commerce sites that are ready for the Holiday: from department stores, to jewelry, candy, and lingerie.

I find it interesting to see a holiday like Valentine’s Day play out over the web. On one hand, there is the traditional retail focus on jewelry, flowers, and accessories but they are interspersed with free shipping promotions, shipping guidelines, and gift finders. Throw in a lot of red, red, and more red and you have the state of e-commerce as we run full force into the Valentine’s Day holiday.

Continue reading this entry

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The Retail Email blog has a roundup of this morning’s e-commerce email blasts with attention being paid to today’s email from Saks. The e-mail, entited “8 Great Reasons to Shop Saks.com“, calls attention to some of the new and improved functionality that the retailer has added to their site. Great way to call attention to improvements on the site that may have been implemented over a period of time or that the users may not have realized are there. I think it gets them to explore new areas of the store that they may not have been aware of before.

StorefrontBacktalk has some of the early numbers from this year’s National Retail Federation annual show. Registration and exhibitors are down from last year, but international vendors who will be at the show.

In more NRF news, PredictiveRetailer has a recap of Day 1’s social media happenings. It’s a great review of blog posts and tweets referencing the day’s different sessions. Looking foward to seeing the recap for the rest of the sessions!

For those not attending the NRF Big Show, don’t forget you can use Twitter search to follow the NRF keyword to keep up to date with what’s going in in New York this week. There’s a bunch of attendees who are on Twitter and there’s been some good ideas and comments being posted there. I’ll be Tweeting from the Expo Hall tomorrow.

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I was having a conversation with a colleague of mine who suggested that it would be interesting to see a list of all retailers’ Twitter accounts on one page. We agreed that it would be interesting to see how different retailers are using the same medium – are they promoting sales, offering ideas for their market, reaching out to customers?

Continue reading this entry

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I was curious to see how retailers are handling and delivering mobile content. I decided to visit a variety of e-commerce stores, on my iPod Touch, and captured the results. Consider this a beginning of the year snapshot of the mobile online retail web – I look forward to capturing these sites again in 12 months and seeing what changes.

A few observations:

6 of the 50 retailers redirect iPhone users to a mobile-optimized website: Amazon, Best Buy, Foot Locker, Target, Victoria’s Secret, and Walmart. Ralph Lauren should be on this list, since they offer a mobile-optimized website, but the server doesn’t redirect iPhone visitors.

Way too many retailers have Flash movies with no non-Flash support. Typically these are promotion pieces and don’t interfere with the navigation. However, the Nike shop redirects the iPhone user to a page that tells them they should download Flash with no way to view the site otherwise. I also have to note Ralph Lauren’s Rugby store and Express, both sites are just about completely unusable without Flash.

Kudos to retailers like Gap and J.Crew who have javascript animations for their homepage promotions. The iPhone user still has a pleasant visual experience.

If you are interested or involved with the design, development, or user experience of e-commerce stores, please visit ecommr. ecommr is a website showcasing the best (and sometimes worst) in e-commerce design, with a clear focus on the individual elements that make up online stores.

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  Abercrombie & Fitch
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  American Eagle
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  Amazon
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  Anthropologie
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  Armani Exchange
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  Best Buy
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  Bloomingdale’s
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  Bluefly

Continue reading this entry

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I just took a look through my statistics for the year and have compiled a list of the most popular posts here on No Turn On Red. Looks like the real-time information provided by retailers via Twitter was the breakout topic that I wrote about this year.

• More Corporations Offering Gustav Information on Twitter
• Hurricane Gustav, Home Depot, and Twitter
• Online travel agencies & the US Presidential Inauguration
• JC Penney: Teen sex advert not ours
• JCPenney, Twitter, YouTube and Viral Marketing
• NJ GOP Proposes Sales Tax Holiday to Spur Consumer Spending
• Guiding customers to the products they need

Happy New Year to all my readers. May we all be surprised and see 2009 turn into a brighter year than we are all expecting! Thanks to everyone who visits, reads, and shares information from this blog. I do appreciate the readership!

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