This was my Editorial from the July 2008 issue of Internet Retailing magazine.
The paradigm of the web channel being a vast shop with elastic walls has run its course. As Ian Jindal packs his bucket and spade for the summer holidays, he considers a new etailing paradigm: active selling in the network age. Retailers have managed the web for too long – our customers want it back!
Patagonia Men’s Bollocks Shirt
Honesty? a boast? Or a case of unfortunate product naming?
The image is safe for work, but the title may cause problems with your firewall…
Let me know of any other unfortunately titled products…
Just off to the Mediafutures Conference in Ally Pally (reaches for A-Z) and wondering whether there’ll be great broadband/mobile reception there ‘cos we’re under a mast?
Interesting day lined up but here’s a quick heads up that there’s a twitter channel at (predictably):
Twitter / mediafutures
I’m not going to promise an update since Nico’s notes are generally quicker and better than any notes I’ve taken at his events 😉
Last Wednesday I was pleased to give the keynote at the Buy.at 5th annual “Speakeasy” event, held at 195 Piccadilly, home of the BAFTAs.
It was an eclectic gathering of a couple of hundred people: merchants, affiliates, programme managers and entrepreneurs in a very open, engaged forum.
I spend a lot of time talking to and writing about retailers and the need to engage fully with the digital, demanding customer, and so it was interesting to have an opportunity to examine the role that affiliates play in connecting products and brands with customers’ wallets.
The blend of large-traffic sites, aggregators (like MyDeco or HousetoHome who put a very professional experience design onto the feeds they receive) and very, very niche affiliates (whether MobileShop.co.uk or perfectlyshapedworld) who put retailers to shame in their focus on customers) covered the gamut of retailing.
Given that we had people from the commercial and operational sides of affiliate marketing it was also an opportunity to examine the drivers for profitability, areas of collaboration and the developing needs that affiliates will have from merchants as they seek to remain relevant to customers in an evermore-demanding marketplace.
Following some good questions (both directly, over coffee and then on the subsequent panel discussions) I met some fascinating affiliates and niche businesses who I’m sure we’ll be seeing in upcoming issues of Internet Retailing.
My thanks to the team at Buy.at for their welcome and hospitality. The event was an examplar of stakeholder communication and networking.
It’s also about the only time I’ll ever get to stand on the stage at the BAFTAs… 😉
Update: Ian Jindal’s slides from Speakesy, May 2008 – contents and images are all copyright, but you’re welcome to use with attribution.
A combination of carbon awareness, recessionary trends and a non-existent expenses budget have kept our Editor in Chief’s focus firmly on Europe this month – just a well, since the rest of the world’s focusing upon Europe too…
The European bloc is the third most attractive global market – after the US and China – and, despite the differences in culture, language and infrastructure, this agglomeration of consumers is at least held together by the twin factors of relative affluence and a consistent legal system – the pre-requisites for trade.
The UK is well-positioned to be at the heart of international moves into Europe: the relatively well-advanced broadband and computing infrastructure, the credit card penetration levels, the enjoyment of shopping (online and off) and the ready acceptance of brand imports from across the pond makes the UK a natural ‘beach-head’ for US aspirations in Europe (or “rest of world” as our cousins so often term it).
The well-developed markets in France and German also hold attractions but outside the big three markets – each with its own idiosyncrasies – any hope of an homogeneous, easily-addressable marketplace evaporates.
Leaving aside language and culture (which of course one can’t) the plain sailing of the ecommerce front-end so often comes to grief on the jagged rocks of logistics and distribution. While it’s easy to present an ecommerce front-end to any market (indeed, we often scour the websites of US-only retailers and ponder the costs of delivery and import duty) it’s a totally different matter to get the goods to the customers. Legacy national carrier networks, cross-border delivery issues, the siting of warehousing, management of credit cards and returns… Ah – all of the problems of real ecommerce, but with a combinatorial level of complexity. Software alone cannot solve this, nor can marketing. Hence we see GSI’s European team investing in local logistics companies and partnerships, and the growth of ‘end to end’ commerce offerings that can provide a complete ‘click to doorstep’ service in-country.
What is the cause of this sudden interest? At a high level there’s a combination of a search for new growth outside the US and UK, a feeling that the technology allows a foray into Europe, and the growth of the indigenous etail markets growing to a critical, attractive mass.
Within this there are five main categories of activity (based unscientifically on my conversations last month):
We will be tracking these developments with interest in these pages in the coming months.
The challenge of Europe is not just one of plugs, pipes and trucks: there’s a ‘selling’ challenge too. While it’s trite to note that customer behaviour may differ in regions and markets, what can we learn from this? Furthermore how can etail professionals move beyond obvious promotional mechanisms and enhance profitability? These questions will be occupying Europe’s leading multichannel retailers in Amsterdam this month for the inaugural European eCommerce Forum (ECF).
The Forum is an invite-only, expert peer group for etailers with €70million+ in etail sales, and will provide a confidential space for discussion, experimentation, benchmarking and networking. A joint initiative of Internet Retailing and Joris Beckers (CEO of FredHopper), we aspire to improve in-country selling capabilities as well as a broader European view.
A fortnight later our colleagues at ACSEL, the French association for eCommerce, will be launching their book – “Europe – an Opportunity for eCommerce ” by Jean-Christophe Defline – at a conference in Paris where I’ll be expanding on the European view from the ECF and the UK perspective on eCommerce.
Most etailers will not welcome further complexity when the focus is upon the likely consumer downturn in the UK, so “Europe” may appear an untimely distraction. However, this syzygy of interest in Europe highlights topics of interest to us all: improved brand and customer communications; dealing flexibly with multiple partners and carriers; learning responsiveness to smaller, niche markets and, of course, driving for growth in a tough economic climate.
This is a great idea. It’s become axiomatic that there’s a skills-shortage in ecommerce, but a less-well documented problem with the explosion in ecommerce is the lack of entry-level, junior skills.
Such has been the growth that experienced ecommerce people are now looking at senior management paygrades, but there’s not been the investment within companies to grow the skills of young, generalist people, or those from other disciplines, to become the ecommerce practicioners of next year.
This initiative answers two problems for businesses:
What will the graduates do?
“What’s included for free on our Graduate Academy:
- 3 day residential training placement in July at Reading University
- 15 days of distance and online training during August
- A further 2 days residential training at the end of August at Reading University
- Free access to www.e-consultancy.com for the period of training
- Guaranteed interviews with leading companies”
We’ll take a look at the progress of the Academy in more detail in InternetRetailing, but in the meantime this is a very welcome initiative and sure to be oversubscribed.
Google has recently added a “UK Retail” resource to its iGoogle offering. This is more than a collection of retail-specific feeds from the existing Google database. Google has worked directly with key information providers to ensure that the feeds provided are relevant, correctly formatted, useful for retail ‘watchers’ and provide a good mass of information. From a publisher’s perspective the new zone offers improved branding (over and above a reader just adding the RSS feed to their own iGoogle account).
Follow the link above (click on the image) to get to a page that shows the widgets I’m running on my iGoogle page. Clearly, I’m promoting the Internet Retailing one (ahem), but there are some very useful other ones – the Comscore live “Top 15” table, and the Hitwise Top10s.
This is a useful ‘radar’ for retail and etail activities, I reckon, but I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts.
This is my Editorial piece from November’s issue of InternetRetailing magazine.
A plague of recruitment calls has set Ian Jindal to musing about what we can learn from the reign of the Chief Electricity Officer.
The phone’s been ringing to the point of melting at IR Towers recently and invariably the opening phrases are either “Hi, I’m looking for a new eCommerce Director – could you help?” or “I work for an exective search firm and a client’s looking for an eCommerce Director – can you help?”. Anecdotal evidence indicates that we’re in a boom in ecommerce – the late adopters (sorry, those with “second mover advantage”) are competing with the pureplays and early-starters for a small pool of talent. Actually, for “talent with experience”.
Such is the clamour for talent that in January’s edition we will look in more detail at the state of skills in the industry – how to grow and retain talent, as well as poaching it.
I’ve had cause to consider the skills we require in senior ecommerce folk: major change management, technical literacy, sales-focused customer marketing, trading experience and if possible some understanding of buying product. Oh, and while you’re chatting to this Superhero, ask whether they have board level gravitas, significant expertise in your sector, a desire to work somewhere lost in the bowels of the company bureaucracy and the self-discipline not to use their x-ray vision other than on company business.
This stringent recruitment requirement – out of kilter with market supply – sent me into the bowels of IR Towers, to the musty library, to research when last there was such an intrusion upon the board hegemony of Managing, Sales and Finance directors (at least, since the invention of Marketing in the 1960s, loosening Sales Director’s grasp on the executive washroom key).
The IT revolution put IT Directors on the Board (now they report to the COO – the morphed, ever-resilient FD in many cases); the people-are-our-capital boom of the late 80s put HR Directors on the Board (they too now find a place within the COO’s domain) and the MBA explosion of the last decade had Strategy Directors and Business Development Directors duking it out for the freshest PowerPoint [tm] templates (now everyone on the board is expected to have an MBA). Of course there are strong HR/IT/Strategy Directors on major Boards. However, if you were to prohibit three directors travelling together on a rickety plane you’d select the CEO, COO and CMO, would you not?
Whither then the eCommerce Director, often batted between Marketing, the COO or as a digital adjunct to B&M? Few today would doubt either the importance or transformational responsibility given to the eCommerce Director, yet a permanent position at the Board table is not a given. eCommerce is still seen as “other”, “different” and something to be dumped on someone else’s desk.
Some dusty research offered up by our nonagenarian archivist reminded me of the brief but important tenure of the Chief Electricity Officer. Electricity defined the modern era, yet was an expensive and immature technology. Once standardisation (voltage, plugs etc) was in place the industry entered the mass-marketing phase – but adoption was slow. In 1902, Niagara Falls alone could generate a fifth of all the electricity used in the United States, and by 1907, only 8% of American homes had electricity. eCommerce is just leaving an analogous phase – with broadband now having reached all of the most commercially-attractive homes in the UK, and browser compatibility and stability taken for granted – customer are now looking ‘through’ the technology and assessing the proposition, the price and promotions.
In order to thrive at the Board table our eCommerce Directors will need every one of the formidable skills that the headhunters are seeking. Alongside them, however, so will their Board colleagues. Which FD can today say they ‘don’t do marketing’, or which CMO could blithely claim to be financially illiterate? Of course this no longer happens. In short order, therefore, we’ll see eCommerce Directors with the full range of skills needed to make a contribution to a savvy, supportive and challenging group of Board colleagues.
This temporary bubble should not relieve Boards of the imperative to fully embrace ecommerce any more than the temporary scarcity of talent in eCommerce should lull specialists into an arrogant separatism. The eCommerce Director has no permanent place at the Board table unless and until she manages to “drop the ‘e'” and become, simply and gloriously, the Commerce Director.
Paul Rouke has written a very nice review of the launch of the House of Fraser ecommerce site on the e-consultancy blog.
As you may know I’ve been working with HOF since February on this project (and recently posted the Telegraph’s coverage of the launch on this blog).
Paul’s coverage is much more thorough and it’s rather spooky that he’s noticed (and credited) the areas upon which we worked really diligently, as well as picking out some areas of great annoyance that – yes indeed – the HOF team are beavering away to improve.
To give a bit of ‘behind the scenes’ perspective, while the Board determination to commit to fuller multichannel operation was in place during 2006 it was only in January 2007 that the company started to develop the functional requirements. From that date (ISTR it was January, the day after I’d been chatting to Paul in Manchester at a Digital Shorts evening…) House of Fraser and the wider group have: created a new platform and best practice company (www.ecommera.co.uk), procured an ecommerce platform (Demandware), appointed lead system integrators and lead creative agency (Javelin Group and LBI respectively), established a contact centre (www.becogent.co.uk) and an outsourced warehousing and logistics operation (www.iforcegroup.com). On top of the platform itself there’s some nice imaging magicke from the good folk at Scene7. All of this has been put in place, from first meeting to launch, in 6 months.
Now, there are many further blog posts on my views on developing a complex system with so many partners, and of course many blog posts that I’m totally unable to write on the matter (!). However, it’s a remarkable achievement and very much to the credit of HOF: their Board for a supportive, clear vision and ongoing engagement in the project; a wonderful project leader (step forward, Colette Wilson), a massive level of ambition from all the partners that this would be a high-water mark and reference for them all; and finally immense amounts of good will and common endeavour from the parties.
With the launch now receding in the rear view mirror the adrenaline’s subsiding and the ongoing questions of performance improvement and site development come to the for. Welcome to eCommerce!
I’ve been working for the last few months with the team at House of Fraser to launch a transactional website. It’s been a very interesting experience with a range of partners and suppliers – more on this in a future post.
For the meantime however it’s starting to get some coverage and this is from the Telegraph’s “Shopwatch” roundup:
At long, long last House of Fraser has finally launched an online store.
From beauty to high-fashion, travel to electrical they are a one-stop haven for the insanely busy and with such a sleek and sophisticated new look, they are bound to attract a more varied clientele.
Womenswear brands range from Nougat to French Connection, whilst children’s and men’s wear have also been incorporated.
Standard delivery charges start from �4, with next day delivery costing �7, and with 61 stores alone throughout the UK and Ireland you’re bound to be spoilt for choice.