The eCommerce job site to find that right candidate.

A new eCommerce job site has launched that specialises only in jobs for eCommerce. If you are a retailer, e-tailers, Solution Integrator or eCommerce software firm then they are currently offering 20 free job posting. As other sites are currently charging £100+ per job posting, posting jobs on eCommerce-jobs.co.uk will save you £2000.

Making money from last seaon's stock

Last season’s stock has always been a sticking point for retailers, but there are ways to maximise profit in this area.

Retailers like TK Max and MandM turn over large revenue from other brands’ last season stock. But if you are a brand or manufacturer, what can you do to maximise your revenue?

The traditional route of having end of season sales is one method that has worked very well for bricks and mortar retailers. Yet while this works for stores, it does not translate well for eCommerce. For eCommerce, there are a number of problems that need to be overcome to make last season’s stock sales effective.
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Traditional eCommerce shoppers will typically be looking for a specific product; they will have arrived at the site by some marketing mechanism such as search engine, affiliate and email campaigns. It is likely that the product is not in clearance, and the way to attract the shopper to the clearance section is with merchandising assets. Using merchandising assets to promote a clearance sale is never the best use of limited space on an eCommerce site, when you want to be promoting items that will provide you with the highest margin. Of course, a merchant could use product recommendations (cross sells, up sells, etc) to promote the clearance, yet the greatest return would never be achieved by using this with clearance items.

The second problem is that all products on a traditional eCommerce site are subject to marketing costs, specifically from affiliates. What might have started out as a healthy margin on a clearance item will quickly get reduced when all costs are taken into account.

The third problem is that if clearance items are put on at the end of each season, the eCommerce platform will have to handle the spike in traffic. Shoppers often wait until the clearance sale before they purchase an item, which happens in both eCommerce and bricks and mortar stores. If the items are put on regularly (weekly or monthly) then the impact of these items can be lost in the normal look of the site, and shoppers may ignore the clearance section.

There is nothing stopping a retailer/manufacturer offloading their last season stock to another retailer who specialises in this area, but the returns made from this are not great. And worse still, the retailer/manufacturer will not know who is purchasing their product, which is very valuable data.

So what other options are there? Well, one that I am most passionate about is online Private Sales, also known as Flash Sales. Private Sales eCommerce sites allow a retailer or manufacturer to offer last season’s stock to an exclusive club of shoppers. There is virtually no marketing cost, as members of the Private Sales site promote the site virally and get rewarded when they do! Each item of clearance is grouped in an Event and each Event has a start and end time; this not only encourages shoppers to participate in the Event on the website, but also encourages imhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifpulse purchasing, which is normally hard to achieve on traditional eCommerce sites. Typically, Private Sales sites see a conversion rate of 10%. The margins achieved from Private Sales sites will be more than a traditional eCommerce site offering clearance items as Private Sales sites do not promote products on affiliate sites or price comparison sites. Lastly, and most importantly, Private Sales eCommerce sites are designed to handle very large peaks of traffic, as each Event can have over one million shoppers attending.

If you are interested in seeing retailers who are using Private Sales for clearance and latest fashion items effectively, then look at online only fashion retailer/manufacturer www.medwinds.com

To learn more visit: inventCommerce

Expanding internationally with eCommerce

Whether you have customers, fans or members, the international market can be very lucrative; but dealing with an International eCommerce channel can be very challenging for some retailers. So what are the right steps to global reach eCommerce?

If you have an eCommerce site that is doing well with your local market you may have looked or have already had interest further afield. The International market can propel your company and dramatically increase your revenue. You may have something that is not available elsewhere and there could be a large international appetite for your products or services. But you may be asking “What is the best way to expand my eCommerce channel internationally and what are the costs?”

When a retailer tries to expand internationally they sometimes run into these common problems: language, currency, payment, delivery, marketing, tax and call centre. This may seem a lot and may put you off international expansion, however the end reward is worth a little investment. And here are common areas that I normally recommend that retailers investigate:

1. Territory expansion: First thing is to understand and plan is which territories you are going to offer to your international eCommerce offering. The first territory that you expand into will be the most important as this will be your basis for expanding into other territories. The first choice should be based on your decision over language, carriers, marketing, tax and other factors. One of the common choices for UK retailers is to expand into Europe; because of it closeness and single currency it is an easy option. However one problem with Europe is that revenue rewards may not be as great as expanding into China and the number of languages that need to be supported will mean hiring either a multi-lingual merchandiser or using a 3rd party to perform all the translations.

2. Language: As I mentioned previously language can be huge barrier to International expansion, it requires merchandisers and marketers to be fluent in the language. 3rd party translators could be used be this can be expensive. Even though online translators are an easy and cheap option they can create mistakes which may insult or put off buyers. One of the easy options is to go for territories that already speak the same language.

3. Tax: Within the EU this does not change, so the price including VAT in the UK is all that needs to be paid. However if you are shipping goods outside the UK then VAT does not need to be charged, so you can offer products to shoppers outside the EU a cheaper priced product then EU customers get. However to adjust the price you need to obtain where the shopper is to be able to change the price. Another thing to bear in mind for taxes is that some countries may charge an import tax to product.

4. Delivery: Just as a shopper in the UK expects a quick and multiple of delivery options so does an international shopper. So selecting a carrier that allows different delivery options is very important. Of course price point will be a key factor as the international shopper will not want to pay over the odds for delivery, yet as a retailer you will need to make a profit from the delivery charge. The carrier will also need to handle the product returns and provide tracking on all international parcels.

5. Currency/Payment: To engage with international shoppers the price of products needs to be in their local currency. As mentioned earlier, one of the easiest currencies to choose would be the Euro, as this covers a lot of countries across Europe. One of the challenges with currencies is figuring out the best way to price each product. This could be a fixed amount that you monitor each month, or be based in real time on the currency markets.
Payments can be very critical for conversion of international shoppers and being able to accept their payment method is essential. This would be easy if every country used the same payment methods of credit and debt card but unfortunately they don’t, so selection of a good payment gateway that accepts the majority of payment methods is essential.

6. Marketing: When entering into new international territory marketing is essential to ensure that you can make a success of this market. Understanding the best approach will either mean doing lots of research or hiring an expert for that territory. Of course using free SEM techniques like speaking to local bloggers will save you a lot of money.

7. Call Centre: It is very easy to forget that shoppers will have difficulties and they will to call up to sort out these difficulties, so having call centre staff that can speak the local language will cut the call time down and also keep the international customer happy. It is possible to use a Live Chat system with in-built translation to handle this type of inbound enquires but this may lead to translation issues.

Expanding internationally can be very rewarding and it is well worth every retailer exploring all options of the best way to approach this. As always the customer should come first and the experience that they receive should be engaging and responsive to encourage them to return time and time again.

If you need help with international expansion then we have experienced experts and systems to help a retailer at different stages of international expansion. To find out more visit: InventCommerce

Medwinds creates a ground swell with the UK press

I had a great day yesterday helping Medwinds promote their new brand, as an online only retailer, to the UK press. There was a great interest from the press in the way that Medwinds have high quality goods and at a price point that other exclusive and fashionable brands cannot achieve.


It was also a great opportunity for me to share how Optaros with the OCentric product is providing Medwinds with an On-Demand scalable platform that can be used across multiple countries and currencies.

The press were impressed with the way that the OCentric platform easily allowed Medwinds to create a community and use this community to understand their customer needs.

The first of these articles were published yesterday on www.InternetRetailling.net

Medwinds clothing, footware and accessories are for both men and women using high quality materials, but at a price point under £80.


The site will launch on 14th Feb in Spain and the UK and with further countries being included later this year.

Using Community to drive revenue on a Retail eCommerce site

I'm running a short webinar this Tuesday 8th Feb at 2pm on how to use Community with eCommerce. To sign up use the following link: http://bit.ly/hkCLZQ

Lush have shutdown their eCommerce site.

Lush.co.uk eCommerce site has been shutdown due to hackers attempting to gain access.
Lush have made the correct decision in shuting down their website so that they can find out how hacker have managed to access the site, even though the loss of revenue will be affecting their bottom line.

What this shows other Retailers is that they need to constantly test for security issues and hack attempts on their eCommerce sites. I know of very few retailers who have employees who's sole role is to validate security on their eCommerce site. If you have your eCommerce solution run by a partner then you should get your partner to validate your website for security problems.

Recommendation of things to do today:
1. Review all software and check for any security updates.
2. Check log files for hackers attempting to access your site.
3. Check all admin/merchant accounts( delete old employees and unused accounts) and validate all passwords are being changed on a regular bases.

Social and Community site for Surrey Mummy's.

For the past 6 months I have been helping my wife launch a social and community site for mothers (and fathers) in Surrey. SurreyMummy aims to offer parents the ability to see what is going and what activities they can do with their children in and around Surrey.
Parents can also chat about their experiences and problems as well as rate and review activities in Surrey.

This site is currently is the Pre-Launch phase and will be officially launched shortly.

It is great to use my community knowledge, learnt from retail eCommerce, and apply this to a non-retail site.

Optaros - eCommerce Innovation partners for Retailers

It has been a while since I last posted to this Retail eCommerce blog and this is due to being busy with my new job at Optaros.
This is an exciting role working for a company who are constantly innovating in the Retail eCommerce space.
Optaros main eCommerce offering is OCentric, which is an Open-SaaS Commerce, Content and Community platform.

London 2012 Mascots launch

The London2012 Mascots have been launched Wenlock and Mandeville.
At the moment there are a few products that can be purchased which feature these mascots on the shop.london2012.com website.

London 2012 Shop is now live

The London 2012 online shop is now Live: http://shop.london2012.com

At the moment there are limited products range of 200 being sold on the site. This will ramp up over time.

The site if fully AA certified with some great features for browsers without Javascript.

It is expected that the hot products will be the collectable pin badges: Badges

The right way to A/B test

A/B testing helps you test ideas on your retail eCommerce site. From the results you can decide if the idea has worked and how much extra revenue it has generated. If no more revenue was generated then you can keep on trying until you find one that works. Simple?

Not really, when you start looking at the data that is generated and examine the different shopper segmentation groups, you may find that result are lower or greater then expected. Why is this? It is because of who the shoppers are, where they have come from and which segmentation group they were put in for the A/B test. For example, you may have a simple A/B test that splits all your shoppers in half, so 50% go to test A and 50% go to test B. How do you ensure that the 50% that go to test A have not all come from affiliate feeds or a PPC advert, where they will naturally have a higher conversion rate and thus generate more revenue?

Now to solve this you could heavily tag the different tests and do deep drive analysis using either Coremetrics or Omniture.

Or, you take the simple route that I recently took, when trialling a product, of pre-segmentation before the A/B tests start. This is very similar to A/A testing but can work on a lot more tests, A/B/C/D/etc..
Before you start your test, segment your shoppers into their test groups. So if you are testing 2 different ideas, you would need 3 test groups, the last being the control group that just sees the normal site. These pre-segmentations should run for half the time of your test; of course as you are not actually running the test, each of your segment groups will just be seeing the normal site. If you can, and if your A/B testing suite allows it, make your shoppers sticky to their segment.
Now that your shopper are pre-segmented you can monitor the difference between your segments, this will be the noise that can get deducted from your final test results.
You can now run your test with the assurance that you have statistically relevant data.

BTW. If you are already doing an A/B test and have not done the above, you can always run it after the test.

- Posted usingt BlogPres from my iPhone

Facebook vs Google

Now that Facebook has over taken Google as the most visited site in the US, all UK retailers should be looking at different ways to Market their retail eCommerce site on Facebook. The reason for this is that the UK is never far behind the US with web trends.

eCommera to run the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic online shop

It was announced yesterday that eCommera are running the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic online shop.
eCommera will run the London 2012 shop on their CoreCommerce Retail e Commerce solution which uses Demandware's high scalable store front.

Other eCommera customers using the CoreCommerce solution include, ASDA, House Of Fraser, Hamleys, USC, Magasin, Garden Bird Supplies, Gardening Direct, The Gardening club and Flying Flowers

Marketing your eCommerce site via social networking

Facebook and Twitter provide retailers with a good way to promote their brand, both of which reach a large audience base. As the only cost to promote a brand on these social networking sites is time, it is an easy win for 2010.
Consumers can be very brand loyal and the highly motivated of these consumers will set up groups, fan bases, etc to inform other consumers of the latest news from these brands. One of the classic examples of this is Apple; consumers have set up a large number of websites, lots of Facebook groups and lots of followers on Twitter. This is great when the messages coming from these groups are positive and promoting the brand, in fact even some negative messages can easily be turned into positives by the brand; however these groups are out of the retailers control and, as such , too much negative messaging can put shoppers off the brand. Apart from the message generated by the groups, the information from the consumers that sign up to these groups is extremely important to the brand for the following reasons:
• How much money they spend on items?
• What products are these consumers interested in?
• Are these consumers also interested in completer products?
• Where these consumers live?
• What these consumers’ views on your brand are?

As this consumer data is controlled by a third party, the retailer does not have access to it and will miss out on using it to help promote your retail ecommerce site.

One of the great ways to control the message that reaches your consumer fan base and also to collect information about your consumers is to create a Facebook page
The reason that I recommend that you create a Facebook page instead of a group is because:
1. Only groups with under 5,000 member can send email blasts
2. Access to pages can easily be controlled.
3. Pages can host applications
4. Pages can benefit from social ads that publicize the fan connection.

Once you have created a Facebook page, look around Facebook for groups that are interested in your brand and then have your new Facebook page join on these groups. The next step is to spread the word around that you have a Facebook page, eg. post on the groups that there is a new Facebook page. Also provide links from your Retail eCommerce site to the new Facebook page, and of course vice versa!

To build up the interest in joining your Facebook page do one or some or all of the following:
• Put limited 1 day voucher codes on the site for anyone who has signed up to your site. The reason of putting a 1 day voucher code is that these codes can easily be distributed by 1 person and which will limit the amount of people who can sign up.
• Provide merchandising press releases on the site on the latest offers or Sales. Remember don’t overdo it, or else your consumers will naturally ignore your message (eg. Viagra emails, need I say more!).
• If you have some new products coming out, promote them first on you new page before these products are released. Make sure that the message is clear about where these products will be sold and the date that these products will be released.
• Provide quizzes on your page that test how well the consumer knows your brand.

Once you have a large fan base, start collecting the data on these consumers, eg. where they live, what other pages they signed up to, are they male or female, married or single, age, etc....
Once you are successful, don’t stop, spend the time each week to ensure that there is new data on the page. Also setup a Twitter account and promote this in the same way of the Facebook.
If you have found this information useful and have set up a Facebook page please add a comment to this blog with the Facebook/Twitter URL.

House of Fraser Online Christmas sells up by 91%

Well done to House of Fraser, who have increased their Year on Year on-line Christmas sells by 91%.

House of Fraser use eCommera to provide the Software as a Service solution for running their on-line retail ecommerce shop. At the heart of this Software as a Service solution is Demandware a leader in the space for providing a 99.97% uptime storefront framework.

10 ways to win in 2010

As eCommerce continues to progress and change, what will be the advancements that retailers take on in 2010? Here are my predictions based on my plans for 2010:

1. Dynamic recommendations
Having automatic recommendations generated for cross-sells and up-sells based on shopper engagement will increase revenue for retailers from 5% - 10%. Dynamic recommendations will also reduce the workload on merchandisers, which will allow them more time to spend on the other important activities.

2. KPI's
Using conversion and CPO by channel does not give retailers all the information about why sales are down or what is going wrong within your supply chain. eCommerce Key Performance Indicaters will allow eCommerce Directors to find problems quickly and allow them to correct them. Michael Ross of eCommera has published a good article on this. Retailers who use a KPI driven eCommerce site will achieve better results in 2010 then those who just use conversion!

3. Master Data Management
Multi-Channel retailers need to have a single repository for Product information and Customer information to effectively present offerings to their shoppers. Most retailers will have some system that holds a minimal amount of data, however to effectively present the same data to shoppers over the web, in catalogues or shop displays, a single repository is required within which product data can be enriched.
As retailers expand their range of products by using Drop Ship Vendors, management of this data through work flows becomes increasingly important.

4. Site redesigns
Sites that have been around for two years are starting to look tired. What looked cutting edge has now become common place. And sites that have had redesigns recently are adding features that are becoming the defacto standard of retail ecommerce. Is it time your site had a redesign?

5. On-site price comparisons
On-site price comparison is where you display the price that your competition is selling the product for. This is very effective when your price is cheaper then theirs. It also stops the shopper from visiting other sites to compare the price, which aids to them purchasing the item from your site.

6. More Payment options
Every retailer offers the standard credit and debit card options through their payment gateway. However, shoppers still require other ways to pay for these items. These can include: Paypal, Google Checkout, Finance options, bank transfers, etc....

7. Better delivery options
All retailers should be offering Next day, Named day and Saturday as part of their delivery options; If you are not, do so now! Shoppers also require more delivery options to suit their busy lifestyles, these include: AM/PM delivery, evening delivery, time slots, Sunday and same day.

8. Extending range
If you are a trusted brand that offers great customer service then shoppers will continue to shop with you. If you want to expand your eCommerce business then you need to broaden your range of products. This can be achieved with very little cost by using Drop Ship Vendors to hold the stock and perform the fulfillment. I've seen this work very effectively with ASDA Direct where they added a Living Aids category. Without any marketing this category does very well.

9. Dynamic customer segmentation
Active Merchandising for me was a big thing in 2009 and all of my customers have this implemented in their eCommerce sites; this is one of the advantages about using a SaaS eCommerce platform!! However other retailers should be implementing this in 2010 to allow the shopper to be directed to products that they may be interested in based on Gender, age group, previous purchases, etc...


10. Shorter checkout process
Checkout processes are too long, and one way to stop shopper drop out is by offering a quicker checkout process.

Post Christmas sales are doing well even before Chirstmas

It is normal in retail ecommerce to start the "January" sales after the last shipping day before Christmas. For retailers that don't have Next Day delivery, this year the online "January" sales started on the 21st December.

Shoppers before Christmas will be looking for Christmas presents, so most online retailers will see low conversation between 21st December and 25th December. However, on Christmas day converstion will start to increase. This year we have seen the busiest day for the "January" sales occur on Boxing day.

Retailers with wider ranges of delivery options will do better in the last week of Christmas

Retail eCommerce does not need to end on the 18th December for Christmas shoppers, retailers that offer Next Day, Named Day and evening delivery on their websites will achieve higher revenues.

For busy professional who don’t have time to get the last of their stocking fillers, shopping on the internet makes life easy. However the problem comes with the delivery of the items before Christmas. All the retailers who only offer a 2-5 day delivery through carriers like Royal Mail will be less popular then those who offer Next Day and Named Day.

Some online retailers this Christmas have been clever enough to offer evening delivery within the London area, like Amazon. Net-a-porter even offer a same day delivery on Christmas Eve within London.

If you are stuck to find a retailer to deliver your presents in time for Christmas, check out these retailers:
www.amazon.co.uk
www.game.co.uk
www.houseoffraser.co.uk
www.hamleys.com
www.net-a-porter.com

Retailers uptime in the run up to Christmas.

It is great news that two of eCommera's retailers have had 100% uptime reported by Keynote systems.

Hamleys the toys retailer and House Of Fraser the deparment store both achieved an impressive 100% uptime. Compare this to Amazon, John Lewis and Toys R US which only managed a 98.x%.

The reason why Hamleys and House Of Fraser can manage a 100% uptime is because they are running on a Software as a Services store front powered by Demandware.

Having an uptime of anything above 99.95% is extremely important at this time of year. If a consumer can't access your website, they won't wait around until your website is backup, instead they will visit one your competitors.


You can read more about this on Internet Retailer: UK Retailers Maintain Strong Site Availability and Response Time on Cyber Monday

Even though Internet Retailer did not mention eCommera's other customers, according to our records each of these obtained a 100% uptime on Cyber Monday.

Blu-Ray Christmas

With the drop of entry level Blu-Ray player to the sub £200 mark, is this "the" adult Christmas present for 2009?


Since the first release of a Blue-Ray player in 2006, the price of the players have been slowly dropping. But until this year the price has been out of reach of the general UK public. Unless there was a need to upgrade an old DVD player, the majority of people were happy to stick with their existing systems.

Last year up-scaling DVD players were very popular as these offered a bridge between the quality difference of HDTV and the DVD format. And with the average price of these being around £60, it gave availability to a wide consumer audience.

Now this year, a number of retailers are selling Blu-Ray plavers from leading manufacturers for under £180 . ASDA-Direct have a Sharp Blu-Ray player for £120 and House Of Fraser have a Samsung player for £169.99

This gives merchandisers a good opportunity to cross sell high margin accessories with the Blu-Ray players. The easiest of these are the HDMI cables, which is a necessity to display films on HDTVs. Another is HDMI switch boxes, most retailer currently don’t stock these, but for a consumer with a TV with only one HDMI socket and more than one HDMI device, these devices are very important. Of course, cross selling the latest Blu-Ray movie, like Harry Potter, is a sure win.

If these are aren't a number 1 for a Christmas present then they will be a very popular item in the January Sales.