Ecommerce Blog of Blueport Commerce, Big Ticket Ecommerce Solutions Provider

Retail CIOs Should Champion Collaboration Across Departments

Friday, February 3, 2012 by Scott Williams

Here at Blueport, we’ve been passing around last week’s StorefrontBackTalk blog post “Should CIOs Now Surrender to Marketing?,” and it has sparked some discourse between our own marketing and technology functions. As Director of Integration, do I think CIOs should surrender to marketing? They already have!

Some don’t know it yet and some have walled themselves up in time capsules, and for both those groups, the battle has passed them by. Those CIOs who don’t know it yet lead organizations that just can’t seem to make up lost ground chasing the most profitable new technologies. Those who have walled themselves off behind pretexts of the need for conformity and centralized control have done nothing but stifle and stratify the process of business evolution critical to ongoing competitiveness. IT organizations that encourage and support peer business unit management of specialized, cost effective, outsourced applications have won the day.

When CIOs Let Go, Bigger Opportunities Result

By foregoing complete control of all that has become the technology function, the CIO also realizes benefits and reveals opportunities. No IT organization has excess resources to spend making specialized applications that compete with today’s best-in-class cloud and SaaS solutions. Spinning off responsibility for tools that cater to subject area expertise allows CIOs to focus resources against core projects where their resources thrive as opposed to working a potentially complicated solution in an unfamiliar discipline.

A Real-Life E-Commerce Example

The real opportunities result when, through a collaborative approach to enabling specialized applications, a vision develops of the next generation corporate infrastructure, an infrastructure that enables and supports snap-in specialized solutions and opens the door to the same type of quick, cost-effective solutions for all business units. Collaboration between the company’s business functions leading to a common enabling infrastructure gives the CIO the benefit of steering decisions on critical issues central to modern IT, such as compliance and security. Finally, the specialized applications researched and implemented by business units act like a research and development IT skunk works, exposing the organization to the newest technologies and solution patterns.

A real world example of this is your typical big-ticket retail e-commerce website. Assuming the CIO chooses to develop the e-commerce solution in house, the company first needs to decide on a technology for catalog, order tunnel, fulfillment, and reporting. Then the CIO must hire a development team or train existing staff. While the staff is either hiring or training, none of them are advancing the IT organization’s other core solutions. And, as the new e-commerce team is building the website against the initial technology chosen, they are already falling behind technically. When the in-house solution finally launches, it is already underwhelming to consumers and, more often than not, the effort needs to be set aside immediately to resume work against the ever-present backlog of requests for changes to core business solutions.

All the while, the CIO could have used one of the SaaS solutions that are evolving quickly and constantly setting new user experience paradigms.

Alternately, if the CIO chooses to embrace an SaaS e-commerce solution advanced by the marketing team, the CIO’s team would have input on integration and security, as well as an easy case with management for building enhancements to core infrastructure and systems. The enhancements to the core infrastructure, quickened and focused by working against the new SaaS e-commerce solution, open the door to additional SaaS or cloud solutions as well as new technology core solutions by the in-house team. And don’t forget the finished product: SaaS solutions evolve very quickly and constantly set new user experience paradigms – customers love the new website. The next SaaS integration is very cost-effective, and the CIO is the hero. Best of all, nothing of true importance was actually surrendered to marketing.

Next week: Marketing responds!

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Are Trigger Emails the Real One-to-One Communication for E-Commerce?

Friday, January 27, 2012 by Betsy Miller

For years, the promise of one-to-one communications with customers has made online marketers giddy with the personalized messages they’d be able to deliver and the resounding results they’d get back. Sadly, reality isn’t always the same as what we can dream up.

In the case of one-to-one marketing, the tools technically exist. Companies have rich data on their customers and e-mail systems have the ability to target based on them, but the missing ingredient is the content that has to be generated to create this truly unique messaging. Is the content creation and its associated cost worth the return on investment, or is there a better way?

Here at Blueport, we’ve worked to achieve true one-to-one communication for our clients and have seen few returns. But trigger messages based on the customers’ lifecycle has been a completely different story. We’re able to segment users and send them relevant messages based on actions they’ve taken on the website. If marketers get too specific, the messaging becomes hard to maintain without becoming more useful .

Apparently we're not the only ones to come to this conclusion. According to a recent article on ClickZ, “Triggered communications are being widely adopted. This is messaging that, while not necessarily personalized in content, is triggered in response to specific behaviors or events, giving each recipient the feeling that the message was personal due to contextual relevance. Whether it's time, location, or behaviorally triggered, such messaging can feel extremely personal and engaging even though it may be being sent to thousands of recipients each day.”

This year, I have seen our retailers embrace the trigger/lifecycle message concept as a requirement to how they do business thanks to its positive ROI and high user engagement. It's just one way we're making ourselves relevant to our customers and not just another retailer in the crowd.

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E-Commerce Shopping Sites vs. Social Sites

Friday, November 4, 2011 by Betsy Miller

Last month, Performics, a global marketing performance company, conducted its Social Shopping Study, which examined how 1,000 people interact with social, shopping and deal websites. The study had some interesting findings:

Men are more likely to visit company/brand/product pages on social sites as part of their purchase decision-making process.
Women are more likely to interact with a company/brand/product page after purchasing.
When examining a range of shopping activities (including finding specials and deals, product reviews, product information, product comparisons), consumers choose e-commerce shopping sites as their go-to destination.
Only 46% of those who responded will look to social networking sites while in a store on a website, but 55% will go to a shopping site in that instance.
When consumers do consult social networks for advice before making a purchase, 60% wait no more than 10 minutes.

While the study indicates that consumers often opt for e-commerce shopping sites, the importance of social networks as a part of the purchasing process is on the rise. Retailers and brands need to consider their social networking presence and be sure they are cultivating an environment of brand ambassadors who can influence their peers in their decisions.

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Today’s E-Commerce Content

Friday, October 21, 2011 by Betsy Miller

Content is king. Sure, this phrase is overused, but that’s because there’s a lot of truth behind it. While much has changed since Bill Gates first said those words in the early days of the Internet, people still want to consume information, and today’s shoppers want to be able to access it quickly and in a number of ways.

For e-commerce sites, content is about creating an engaging brand for consumers. The more you talk to your customers, the more they will interact with your brand and convert.

E-Commerce Content Trends

Here are just a few of the driving content trends for e-commerce today:

Over the past year, many e-commerce companies have hired editorial directors from the publishing world. They are being tasked with pulling all of the content together to create that single voice you might expect from a magazine. And in such cases, “voice” extends to visual aspects of the sites as well.
Thanks to Google Panda and e-commerce websites’ needs to distinguish themselves, it’s no longer enough to post manufacturers’ product descriptions and images. By bringing unique information, engaging storytelling, informed search engine optimization and visual panache, one website can beat out another when it comes to closing the sale.
User-generated content and community continues to flourish both on e-commerce websites and their social media pages. From online reviews to contests where users post content, e-commerce sites are allowing consumers to help create website content and build the brand. Some e-commerce websites even allow customers to customize their products or choose what goes on sale. Content allows e-commerce shopping to become a participatory and social experience.

E-commerce websites are becoming destinations beyond a place to shop. Those websites that are able to use content to transform their websites into destinations for customers to browse and spend time will continue to thrive. Selling online is not just a numbers game. It’s about offering a service customers want, and content should be at the forefront of that strategy.

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SEO Won’t Go Away for E-Commerce, But It Will Evolve

Friday, September 23, 2011 by Betsy Miller

The title of a recent E-Commerce Times article, “The Coming Irrelevance of SEO,” did its job and got me to click through. (Of course, I found it by searching Google.) The piece says that online retailers should begin preparing for the future and focus less on search engine optimization for driving sales and instead should harness the power of marketplaces. “Thanks to improvements in trust and safety, as well as predictability enhancements that brands like Amazon and eBay have brought to the space, consumers simply aren't turning to Google to purchase products,” writes the author Brian Horakh, who is also the founder of Zoovy, which is an integrated marketplace e-commerce solution, not that he’s biased. It’s unclear how this is an either/or scenario -- you can have a marketplace presence and promote your goods through SEO.

Not to hold onto the past, or even the present, I believe that SEO will continue to be a valuable tool for e-commerce websites. Purchasing is just the last step in the process. When customers research items, search engines are a premier starting point. We also don’t know what leads to that final visit where the purchase was made. Was the click from a friend’s review the first visit or the ninth? Perhaps the review helped close the sale, but the initial visit to the company’s e-commerce site may have come from a pay-per-click ad or from a link in organic search.

Good SEO Is Good Content

What even Internet experts tend to forget is that good SEO does not have to be a daunting task. Think about your business and your audience. What does your target audience want that you can provide? If you provide quality content that consumers want, then the SEO part falls into place. Sure, you can mix things up a bit and use different phrases to say the same thing, but that is also considered to be good writing. For example, if you are writing about a sofa, you might also refer to it as a couch or seating -- that reads better than using “couch” over and over again, and it’s good SEO.

Creating good content will also help you as social networks grow. Consumers want to share good content -- they’ll link to it from Facebook posts or reference it in their own blogs. And appropriately tagging user-generated content on your e-commerce sites, like reviews, for example, will help users and search engines find them.

Link farms and black hat tricks gave SEO a bad name earlier this year. But as the Google algorithm continues to evolve, so will SEO practices. And as long as you are focused on your audience, your e-commerce site will benefit.

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Keep Your E-Commerce Site on Target and Avoid Outages

Friday, September 16, 2011 by Betsy Miller

When a retailer launches a new line, media coverage is usually more than welcome. But in the case of Target’s new Missoni line, the more than 200 headlines found literally around the world could have had a better message. These reports all focused on how the large retailer’s e-commerce site, which recently switched from an Amazon back-end to one that’s proprietary, crashed under the heavy traffic.

Target was not prepared for the customer demand for this limited-edition designer line, and the e-commerce site was down for approximately 12 hours. The line’s launch – and the site’s crash – was preceded by amped up publicity for the line, leading to starlets discussing their interest in specific items on Twitter before the line was available. Of course, unhappy Target.com shoppers went to Twitter as well when they couldn’t access the website once these items were for sale.

While Target says this specific demand was unprecedented, dwarfing the traffic they get even on Black Friday, it is important for e-commerce websites to be prepared. Knowing the marketing push behind the Missoni line and the interest it was generating in social networks, Target should have taken steps to ensure the website would work as if it were any other day.

At Blueport, when we know one of our clients’ e-commerce sites will be getting extra traffic due to an incredible sale or promotion, we take steps in advance to be sure the websites can handle the onslaught of traffic. For example, when one of our clients ran a Living Social daily deal, our IT Operations department took action so the user experience was not affected in any way.

When your company plans a spectacular event, make sure that the event is as spectacular online as it is offline. And this becomes even more important as the holiday shopping season approaches. Online retailers should take the steps now to be sure their websites will be able to do what they need them to do this holiday season – and that’s selling merchandise.

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Blueport Commerce Is on the Move!

Thursday, September 8, 2011 by Morgan Woodruff

It’s moving week at Blueport Commerce! We will be opening for business at our new offices at 580 Harrison Ave. in Boston’s South End on Monday, September 12th. Everyone here is very excited about this next step in our company’s growth.

We spent quite some time finding our new space, all told about 16 months. We wanted a mix of everything: a beautiful space where we could continue to grow, a building that could meet our technical needs, amenities for our staff and an exciting place for clients and partners to visit. After much searching, we found the space. We were able to get all we wanted and more. The time is right, and we’re making the move.

These types of changes often get you thinking about your past as much as your future. How did we get here?

Remember when people were hesitant to buy anything online? That’s when we started selling furniture on the Web as Furniture.com. We have evolved from a Web portal selling furniture to a technology and services provider for big-ticket retailers who want to sell and brand their hard-to-ship items online. We’ve already extended to markets adjacent to the furniture industry, such as appliances, electronics, flooring, carpet and more. We’ve been helping clients navigate their ways through social networks, daily deals and more. As a business, we have evolved, and now it’s time our office space catches up.

The future for Blueport Commerce is forecasted to be even brighter. As the market focuses on local e-commerce (something we’ve done for quite some time), we are poised to continue to be a leader. Come visit us, and see for yourself.

Copyright 2010, Official Blog of Blueport Commerce

Scenes from the Summit: Pacific Crest 2011

Friday, August 12, 2011 by Morgan Woodruff

The Pacific Crest Global Technology Leadership Forum for 2011 was again held in glorious Vail, Colorado. Blueport's third year at this event kicked off on Sunday with an investment-banker-driven, 7-mile run from the town (8,150 ft.) up to nearly the summit (11,428 ft.). What were they thinking? This was followed by a cocktail reception that night for the private and public companies attending. At this early stage in the conference, it was impossible to wrap your head around the event yet: It was a Sunday night and you were working with half the oxygen you’re used to. You spoke with tons of contacts, but there was no mention of the technology, localized e-commerce, social and mobile buzzwords that would be unavoidable in the remaining days.

The sun crested over the mountains at 5:29 a.m. and breakfast began at 6. Pacific Cresters fluttered around, effectively lining up 48 hours of ducks. You had to caffeine it up -- you needed it.

The summit had three modules -- two unique. At most tech summits, you end up in a room with Google or Gilt listening to egos roar as Sergey or Susan talk about how killer things are in ecommerce, search, social commerce and more. At Pacific Crest, these more generic types of corporate briefings were done throughout the two days and you slot them in as best you can. But most of the fun comes from the two more unique tracks of this conference: One portion is the roundtable discussions where industry focus meets opinion. Our CEO, Carl sat on the Internet Digital Media panel this year with Don the Tool King and the CEO of Beyond the Rack. The discussion is led by bankers and analysts who cover the e-commerce space. This year, logistics and inventory (Do you job it out? CAPEX it?) was among the hotter topics. Our market validation vis-a-vis panel discussions with these high-caliber attendees is flattering. When someone who runs a $17 billion fund nods in agreement -- well, nothing is quite like it.

This year, I spent most of my time differently than in the past. I focused on briefing investors interested in e-commerce platforms and, hopefully, Blueport.

Meetings were 25 minutes each (with 5 minutes for travel time to the next meeting lovingly factored in -- very 503, you know 917 wouldn't do that). They’re like those goofy Hollywood junket interviews for movie premieres. I did my best to not pull a Christian Bale, while sitting in a hotel room stripped of its beds (because THAT would be awkward), saying roughly the same thing over and over, changing it slightly for the audience and its reactions. They went something like this:

Them: Are you profitable?
Us: What's your average check size?
Them: Year-over-year growth?
Us: What are you looking for in your next portfolio company?
Them: We typically would invest $25 to $50 million, but we did a round with Facebook at $200.
Us: OK, we want $5. Can we make that work?

Before you can imagine, there's a knock on the door. It's over and on to the next. It's a blast, and it’s exactly what I love about my career; that it's not a job or work per se, but it's fun. I'm insanely lucky. Events like this remind me of that.

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5 Ways for Online Retailers to Be a Little Fab

Friday, August 5, 2011 by Betsy Miller

Fab.com is one of the latest fabulous e-commerce stories: Originally launched by entrepreneur Jason Goldberg as Fabulis, a social networking site for gay men, the company was then revamped and renamed to be the design flash sales site it is today. And by the time it reached its sixth week, the company was already turning a profit, had 400,000 users, and received $8M in Series A funding. Investors in Fab.com include Menlo Ventures, The Washington Post Company, SoftTech VC and Ashton Kutcher.

But with so many flash sales sites out there in the e-commerce game, why is Fab.com such a success? Here are five reasons why we’ve become fans of Fab.com.

Do What You Know and Are Passionate About

According to this piece from VentureBeat, Goldberg and cofounder/chief creative officer Bradford Shane Shellhammer settled on the formula that is now Fab.com because of their backgrounds in building websites and design, respectively. The result is a beautiful, well-built website that brings its customers a wide array of items all brought together because of their unique design sensibilities.

Products = Content

While we’ve been seeing many e-commerce sites bring an editorial spin to their product pages -- Gilt Groupe has been poaching a number of folks from the magazine world to work on its sites -- for example, you get a sense that Fab.com treats the items it sells like content to be consumed that way. And as members, we tend to look forward to their emails much like we’d look to a magazine to tell us about the newest trends and neatest gadgets. The difference is now, I can easily buy what they show me.

A Fostered Sense of Community

Since Fab.com’s origin was as a social networking site, you would expect some innovation here. But the way the initial phase of Fab.com has integrated social community has been in a very clean, modern way. Goldberg has the Betashop blog, where he gives an insider’s look at the company. There is also a Fab blog, which features products, and an Inspiration wall where members can post pictures. To close the loop, Fab.com includes quotes about the collection from members of the Fab.com or the designers, giving a little more context as to what the collection is and why it is for sale on the website. For customers, this gives real personality to the products.

Constantly New Inventory

Of course the inventory and products on a daily deals site will change more frequently than on a conventional e-commerce site. But the items on Fab.com aren’t just new to Fab – they are new to the consumers. The products are curated in such a way that there is a real sense of novel and innovation with each new sale on the site. This is also what keeps customers coming back – Goldberg has cited repeat buyers as a contributor to the success.

Consumer Love Is the Best Marketing

To date, Fab.com has not had a major marketing push. It appears that much of their resources have been spent on getting the right products presented in the right way. This stellar combination has made way for a strong word-of-mouth campaign as subscribers spread the Fab.com love. Are there ways you could improve your own products, customer experience and customer service to foster positive word-of-mouth from your existing customers?

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Can Groupon Work for Big-Ticket Items?

Friday, July 29, 2011 by Betsy Miller

Earlier this month, when Groupon’s first big-ticket deal for $199 for $500 toward a new car at a Detroit area dealership failed, it didn’t only make for amusing headlines (“Groupon Hits the Skids,” for example). It also got people asking whether the daily deal model can work for big-ticket items.

As a company that provides the technology and services to help its clients localize big-ticket retail online, Blueport Commerce takes the stance that daily deals can work for big-ticket items if executed correctly. The Groupon car deal was not.

Why Conventional Daily Deals Work

Daily deals are so popular, because they are great deals. Groupon’s subscribers expect a significant discount on the goods or service being sold. Half off a dinner? Wonderful, and I’ve been meaning to try new places!

So far, successful daily deals have been somewhat simple and often for items subscribers were likely to spend money on anyway. Salon services at 70% off? Well, I do need a haircut anyway.

Lastly, the offer is usually concrete. I will pay X and get Y. Any variables in what I spend beyond what I paid for the Groupon are easily in my control.

So What Was Wrong with the Automotive Offer?

The offer was to buy $500 that could then be used toward a new car. A quick look at the dealer’s website has cars starting around $16,000. So someone who bought the deal is only getting at most a few percent off his final purchase.

Among the things that makes daily deals so successful is the easy spontaneity of it all. You only have a short amount of time to choose this deal, and then it’s gone. But it takes people some time to research a purchase like a car.

A recent article from The Atlantic, points out that one issue with this deal is that car price is negotiable. The piece quotes Ben Edelman, an associate professor at Harvard Business School as telling Reuters: “This voucher is for a very small portion of the cost of a car or lease, so it’s basically an agreement to buy or lease a car from LaFontaine. That’s poor negotiating because the dealer could take advantage f that by offering the same car for more money. They (Groupon) need to fix that before this part of the model can take off.”

The Big-Ticket Daily Deal Challenge

Many folks are saying that daily deals won’t work for big-ticket items. Perhaps these are the same people who years ago told us that consumers would not buy furniture online. But people do buy furniture and other big-ticket items online, so eventually daily deals in this arena could take off.

Our client The RoomPlace actually did a successful daily deal with LivingSocial not too long ago. The offer was $150 worth of furniture for $75. This worked because even though the offer was for big-ticket items like furniture, consumers could choose from a large price range and could choose whether they purchase something solely for the face value of the deal or use it toward a larger purchase.

Big-ticket retailers can look to daily deal sites, or create their own, in order to drum up business. For great results, they need to turn their big-ticket deal into something that is concrete for users. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

Be sure that a consumer could leave your store or website with an item or service for the value of the deal.
Consider offering a specific item at a steep discount rather than following the voucher model.
Once the consumer cashes in on the deal, be sure you do what you can to keep in touch, such as offering an at-register email sign-up or customer survey.

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What Retailers Can Learn from Netflix’s Big Multichannel Mistake

Friday, July 22, 2011 by Betsy Miller

Last week, Netflix announced a change in its subscription plans and their cost structure. The news was met by anger from many of its customers. In an Econsultancy blog post, Patricio Robles summed up the misstep: “At the end of the day, Netflix is making the same mistake many publishers are: It's hoping to charge consumers by the channel. Want to watch movies on DVD? You have to pay for that. Want to stream movies over the Internet? You have to pay for that separately.”

This forces customers to choose between the two methods, which, from the pricing, Netflix proposes are equal. But with the discrepancy in the number of titles available in the DVD library versus the streaming library, consumers disagree and are enraged.

This is another case, where the retailer is seeing the business differently than the consumers who ultimately foot the bill. And in this economy, consumers will not pay for something unless they see the value – no matter how loyal they have been to the company until now.

Your customers expect a consistent experience with your brand, no matter how they are accessing it, whether in person, on your e-commerce site, or even elsewhere on the Web, like your Facebook page or Twitter account. And your customers expect you to be available in these different venues so they can interact with your brand on their own terms. At Blueport, we work with our clients to be sure the messages customers see online are what they would see in-store, from consistent local pricing to real-time availability.

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When It Comes to the Newest Technology, Set Objectives First

Friday, July 15, 2011 by Betsy Miller

Everyone wants to be involved with the newest technology, right? Retailers and consumers alike want to play on the newest playground with the newest equipment, along with the coolest, most influential kids, whether that means Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr today, Google+ tomorrow and who knows what next week. But before an e-commerce company jumps on the latest technology bandwagon, people need to stop and think about the website’s strategy and what is right for the overall business. That’s just what David Rogers, author of The Network Is Your Customer: 5 Strategies to Thrive in a Digital Age, wrote in a BNET blog post.

It’s almost as if the technology itself becomes bigger than its function. Brands tend to jump in so quickly that Google was compelled to post a YouTube video asking businesses to hold off on creating Google+ profiles until the business version is released.

While we at Blueport understand that brands do need to get out there and dip their feet in new technologies, strategy should come into play first. We work with our clients to help them determine their objectives before taking action. We don’t just help them administer Facebook contests, but we ask them why they want to have a Facebook contest – what is the real goal for the company? Then, based on our clients’ objectives, we offer suggestions that make the most sense for their brands and that will deliver the best return on investment.

New technology presents a new frontier, even for companies that already have an e-commerce presence. It helps to create a digital strategy to guide you in this unmarked territory.

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Consistency Is Key in This Multichannel Retail World

Friday, July 1, 2011 by Betsy Miller

We’ve all read the news – most likely on a tablet or e-reader of choice – that brick-and-mortar bookstores are closing left and right as their electronic counterparts comparably flourish. But recently, I needed a book.

As do many shoppers, I began with online research. I went straight to a major book retailers’ website and located the title. I was disappointed that I could no longer order the book online for in-store pickup or even find out if my local store had the book in stock. But I could locate the closest store, which took some doing in light of the above-mentioned closings.

In-store, the item was priced 30% more than on the retailer’s website. The manager explained it was for the convenience of coming into the store, and no, it’s not confusing, because the company gets the money either way. I left unlikely to buy from the store or the e-commerce site again.

A Seamless Experience Between Online and In-Store

Of all the retail categories to know the right way to sell in a multichannel retail environment, you would expect books to have it mastered. After all, e-commerce began with bookselling.

Seeing where the book retailer got it wrong, while we here at Blueport are able to get it right as we help our retailers sell big-ticket items online, reminded me of just how new e-commerce and getting different retail channels to work together is.

But consumers are ready, and delivering a consistent experience between all of your retail channels is a must, particularly for considered purchases like furniture and appliances. This is why we tie into our retailers’ existing systems to show their customers consistent local pricing, real-time availability and a way to see the items in a store or to order online. We allow our retailers to give their customers control, so they can get the information they need, whenever and however they want it.

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Get Your E-Commerce Website Ready for Daily Deals

Friday, June 17, 2011 by Betsy Miller

Groupon has more than 83 million subscribers; LivingSocial more than 28 million. According to Bloomberg, 480 companies are competing in the daily deals space – including everyone from Google and Facebook, which have recently tossed their hats in the ring, to niche sites like the socially conscious Roozt.com or the kosher-inclined Jewpon.com.

With the potential traffic that could come from offering a daily deal, retailers that are considering teaming up with one of these sites need to be sure their own e-commerce websites can handle the load.

A Daily Deal Case Study

Our client The RoomPlace offered a daily deal through LivingSocial: $150 worth of furniture at 50% off. The site activity the day the deal ran was considerable:

67% increase in website traffic
65% increase in bandwidth used
75% increase in calls for content.

Foreseeing the increase in site usage, we made sure all product and site changes that we usually update daily were completed before the daily deal email was sent. We worked with Akamai to increase the regular cache time to 48 hours. This ensured our regular customers would have a seamless site experience and that the influx of new traffic from the daily deal would be able to get to and see the site pages quickly. As a backup, our operations team set up additional hot standby servers.

Our operations team closely monitored live site usage throughout the day the deal went out – just in case. Thanks to the precautions taken, the additional traffic had no effect on site speed, nor was there any downtime.

“Planning ahead, both from a technical and a business perspective was essential,” says Kathryn Kerrigan, e-commerce manager for The RoomPlace. “Thanks to forethought and site stability, we were able to accommodate and convert numerous new customers.”

No matter what kind of business you run, a daily deal offer will drive a lot of new customers to your website. These new customers want to know what their getting whether or not they plan to use the deal online. Beyond the window dressing, be sure your website is technically ready so new customers will get a great first impression and come back for more.

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Could Branded Social Games Increase Your E-Commerce Conversions?

Friday, June 10, 2011 by Betsy Miller

Social gamers are a very attractive audience for e-commerce merchants. An eMarketer report projects that 68.7 million Internet users will play at least one social game per month by 2012. And according to GigaOM, 55% of social gamers in the US are women with an average age of 48 years old; 38% of those women play social games multiple times a day. Retailers selling big-ticket, highly considered products know that this profile aligns with the consumers who possess the income and decision-making power to buy.

Social Games and E-Commerce Conversion Today

As with many aspects of social media marketing, social gaming’s e-commerce conversions are not necessarily as high as merchants would hope. The accepted approach is to cast a very wide net to compensate for the low conversion rate. Often, consumers are much more interested in playing Bejeweled for free, and the advertising is just secondary noise on the screen.

Could Branded Games Perform Better for E-Commerce?

Some companies are looking to use branded social games to cash in on the medium. HSN, or Home Shopping Network, has added social games to its e-commerce site, allowing players to post and share scores on Facebook. Two of the games have direct product tie-ins, including a jigsaw puzzle of an item that’s only on sale for 24 hours. All HSN's games will show a steady stream of featured products playing alongside them.

Other companies have created their own games to create brand awareness, like Purina’s Purina Pet Resort on Facebook or VinTank’s multiplatform VinPass, which aims to help wineries connect with consumers. Marriott has gotten in the game with its own version of FarmVille – My Marriott Hotel – for recruiting purposes.

Is Social Gaming Marketing Is Right for You?

A recent iMedia Connection article suggests you ask 3 questions before marketing your brand in the social gaming space:

Does your target audience already play social games?
Will your brand be able to be relevant and integrated into the game, creating a good user experience for the gamer?
Will you be able to entertain and reward players to create deeper engagement with your brand?

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Will You Make Back Your Online Advertising Spend in Store Sales? Yes!

Friday, June 3, 2011 by Carl Prindle

All retailers want to know that the money they spend online is coming back to them some way, somehow. It's become a mantra that the majority of consumers who buy in stores research online first, but in truth, it can be hard to follow customers from their keyboards to retailers’ registers.

We at Blueport see the value that local e-commerce and online marketing bring to our brick-and-mortar clients every day. But, it certainly helps when a company like Google offers Online to Store research that quantifies cross-channel results.

Google set out to prove that online advertising leads to in-store sales. For one national retailer, testing keyword advertising specific to one product category not only lifted in-store sales for that category by 3.6%, but the online advertising had a halo effect, lifting sales in all other categories by 1%. And, the bigger the ticket, the better the results were.

HP Case Study Shows ROI Is Higher with Bigger-Ticket Items

The Google Retail Advertising Blog post about Hewlett-Packard and the study discusses the following findings:

Overall, HP’s online to store campaign had a 530% overall return on ad spend
The top 25% of markets in the test had a 1,090% return on ad spend
Higher-end models correlated with a higher increase in store sales.

How Can You See Your Own In-Store Return on Your Online Presence?

In an interview, analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik offers some ideas for getting quantitative information on how your online efforts contribute to in-store sales.

Some ideas you might be able to implement for your retail business:

Offer an online survey as consumers exit your website, asking where they plan to buy and how likely they are to buy based on the experience they’ve had online.
In-stores, include a call-to-action to take an online survey for a chance to be entered into a sweepstakes and ask questions about where their interactions with your brand began.
Use a store card program, where you have a number attached to customers when they interact with and buy from you online and in-store.
Allow customers to order online and pickup in-store, and then track additional in-store purchases as a result of the pickup.

We're just at the beginning of this trend. As localized e-commerce gains traction and enables synchronized web to local store marketing, we'll start to see new sectors of retail get even more involved (and see even better results). In the meantime, even this simple test shows how stores can -- and in today's world, must -- harness the power of online marketing.

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Should Your E-Commerce Site Offer Live Chat?

Wednesday, May 25, 2011 by Betsy Miller

There’s been a lot of chatter about live chat lately. This month, LiveChat announced new features for triggering prospects and measuring conversions from its software, and Bold Software and The E-Tailing Group released the results of a study on the effectiveness of live chat for e-commerce websites. Does your e-commerce platform need to incorporate live chat functionality?

Live Chat Allows Customers to Contact You in the Way They Want To

E-commerce is about convenience. It’s about consumers being able to purchase from your retail business the way they want, when they want. And this convenience should extend to how customers can communicate with your company. Today’s consumers want to be able to choose the options that work for them, and well-thought-out live chat is an option the consumers you want to reach are interested in.

The Bold Software/E-Tailing Group research finds that 20% of shoppers prefer live chat. And this 20% of consumers tends to include those age 31 to 50 with above average income and who are more likely to be college educated and spend more online on an annual basis than other shoppers. Can you afford not to appease this audience?

The Right Way to Execute Live Chat

If you’ve decided live chat is the right option for your e-commerce business, you need to be sure to implement it correctly. Customers who engage in live chat say its success completely lies with the chatting customer representative. They found the chat software’s features to be far less important.

The E-Commerce Edge Is Customer Service

At Blueport, when we work with clients that are implementing live chat, we instruct them to really think about who they are assigning this task. We find the ideal chatters to be web-savvy and have a good mix of customer service and sales skills. Deep knowledge of the product catalog is essential.

Your retail chatters need to be clear on their goals, which should most likely be customer satisfaction and closing the sale. Chatters should also keep in mind that the customer decided to reach out to them via chat, so they should tread carefully about sending users to alternate medium, like the phone or in-store, for resolution. Your chatters need to be empowered to quickly answer questions and resolve issues all within online chat or in the follow-up method each customer prefers.

Are You Going to, or Have You Already Implemented, Online Chat for E-Commerce?

If you’re thinking of incorporating live chat, remember that the software is just a piece of the puzzle. Go to sites that offer online chat and see what does and does not work for you as a consumer. How long of a wait for the retailer rep to begin the chat is too long? Could the chatter answer your catalog questions, or could you learn more from the product page? If an item was out of stock or not what you wanted, were you offered alternatives? When you said you’d come back later or go to the store, were you given an incentive to buy today. Note what your frustrations and what you liked so you can incorporate best practices into your own implementation.

If your website already has live chat, how do you know if you’re maximizing this opportunity? Regularly review the transcripts to see what opportunities may have been lost and to see if you have given your chatters the information and tools they need to make the customer interactions successful. And be sure to engage in live chat on your website as a customer every now and then to see that the experience is what it should be.

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3 Reasons Why Quality Content Could Be Your Key to E-Commerce Success

Wednesday, May 11, 2011 by Betsy Miller

Back in the early days of the web, when many of us pioneered this business, there was the notion of sticky content. Sticky content was all about putting content on your website to encourage visitors to linger and come back to your site. This was back when business plans were thin, eyeballs were all the rage and no one talked about conversions. But then the dotcom bubble burst, and content creation was deemed an unnecessary task as website teams trimmed down and struggled to keep their Internet businesses afloat.

Fast-forward to now: Content has made a comeback. Google, blogs and social sharing have made offering unique, quality content in some form to your customers a must for any website and a competitive advantage for e-commerce sites. Here are 3 of the top reasons why.

#1 Your Customers

Remember: E-commerce site content takes the place of welcoming sales associates at a brick-and-mortar store. From calls to action to your About Us page, what is the impression you want to make? Also, e-commerce retailers ask their customers to buy items with limited senses. Well-crafted product descriptions can fill the void for customers who wonder what an item really feels like in person. Buying guides and other advice can lead customers through the process of purchasing online and specifically via your website.

Tip: As an e-commerce website, you are a content publisher. Define your target audience and who you are as a retailer. Be sure your content’s voice and tone live up to and reinforce the promises you want to make. Style guides are not just for logos and fonts.

#2 Your Brand

The content you publish on your e-commerce site is an extension of your business. It allows you to give your company a voice and to set yourself up as an advocate, trendsetter, thought leader, or whatever best sets your specific e-commerce business apart. And thanks to social sites, if the web content you create is engaging, sharing it is easier than ever. Good, interesting content can spread like wildfire – are you creating any? If you deliver content that is truly helpful and unique, your customers will blog about it, share it on Facebook, Tweet it and more. Quality content allows others to be your brand ambassadors.

Tip: You can start getting the word out yourself! Share your site’s content via a corporate blog, Twitter account, StumbleUpon, etc.

#3 Search Engine Optimization

Anyone who knows their SEO stuff will tell you: When it comes to search engine optimization, nothing beats fresh, original content. While link baiting and creating directory pages on your own site will help with your organic search rankings, it should supplement your real content offering. Just look at how well blog posts rank on Google. By nature, well-written content is full of keywords, whether on a product page or in an article related to the types of product you sell online. A fresh content offering gives spiders something new to crawl, and nothing beats a quality offering to encourage people to read and link to what you’ve written. And with Google Panda, being sure your product descriptions are truly unique will only benefit your e-commerce store.

Tip: A corporate blog is a great way for an e-commerce site to get into the content arena. You don’t have to worry about integrating a content management system into your platform, and you can use a blog to introduce new products, offer tips and share relevant news about your online retail business.

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Could Google Buzz Privacy Settlement Be a Bust for B2C E-Commerce?

Wednesday, April 27, 2011 by Betsy Miller

Google got in a heap of trouble last year when it launched its Buzz social-networking product, prepopulating it with personal information from users’ Gmail accounts without consent. The Federal Trade Commission has proposed a settlement that could become the new privacy standard for the Web.

According to a recent ComputerWorld article, the settlement “requires Google to get ‘express affirmative consent’ from its users for ‘any new or additional sharing’ of personal information with third parties if the new sharing is a change in Google's practices.” It also requires Google to implement a comprehensive privacy program and independent privacy audits for the next 20 years.

What the Google Settlement Could Mean for B2C E-Commerce

Consumer e-commerce sites share some customer information in order to create targeted, personalized experiences for their audiences. In many cases, this can be as benign as a ZIP code so advertisements display merchandise locally available to customers.

Since the proposed settlement includes any customer information -- not just personally identifiable -- functional changes in why an Internet company shares ZIP codes and other data points could potentially require a user’s permission.

According to FTC attorneys, the part of the settlement the FTC would like to extend to be an industry norm is the requirement for a comprehensive privacy policy.

If your e-commerce company has a strong, comprehensive privacy policy that outlines the ways in which your company uses and shares personal information, then additional customer opt-ins should not be a problem. Even if you change vendors, as long as the type of information you use and the reason you use it stays the same, you would not need to notify customers. What you wouldn’t be able to do is retroactively change your privacy policy without users’ knowledge.

Additionally, if you have a global audience -- or hope to one day -- EU data privacy laws require you to disclose what data you keep on your site visitors and how you use it. And you have to give consumers a chance to object to the use of their information. So buttoning up your privacy policy makes good business sense in our global economy.

So what do you think: Is being more transparent with users about how e-commerce sites use their information an industry norm that’s been a long time coming, or has Google’s missteps ruined it for the rest of us?

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Is CSN Stores the Amazon of Home?

Tuesday, April 19, 2011 by Morgan Woodruff

I just read a great article on our friends at CSN Stores and their plans to continue to dominate the home goods segment of B2C e-commerce.

While they aspire to be the Amazon of home, co-founder Niraj Shah is 'careful to point out the differences between the companies—a key one being CSN’s focus on home products and its “specialized supply chain” for items like furniture. By shipping directly from manufacturers, CSN has managed to offer a large selection without having to stock its own warehouses (at least up to now).'

From our perspective as fellow big-ticket retailers, CSN is doing a few more things right that should help them leapfrog over Amazon in this space.

First, CSN recognizes that buying items for your home, especially large pieces of furniture, can be quite different then buying a book. So in additional to providing more detailed product information, they have customer support available via chat and phone to assist potential customers .

Second, they also know that because they aren't always putting a package into the hands of UPS but rather with various freight companies, their centralized support is there during and after the delivery process to make sure every customer is happy.

We welcome companies like CSN Stores that continue to help break down the ecommerce barriers and show that there's more than one way to become one of the world's biggest retailers.

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