Sylleptic

I was at e-commerce expo in London on Tuesday, speaking to technology vendors, listening to presentations, all the usual exhibition things. The e-commerce space is very complex: if you examine a typical modern online store, it has many components, probably including the following:

• a core e-commerce platform (perhaps ATG, IBM, MS Commerce Server, Demandware) which can have many features including promotions, the basket and checkout functionality
• a merchandising tool, which the retailer uses to organise how products are presented to consumers, and increasingly merging with search (all those named above have one, but Mercado and Endeca are well-liked today)
• analytics and reporting tools like Coremetrics and Omniture (and again lots of others bundle this in)
• product imaging solutions like Scene 7
• product review features,  perhaps from Bazaarvoice, Reevoo or Feefo

… and these are just some of the options. Throw in order management, fraud detection and payment handling… the vendor landscape is very complex, and there is a healthy economy in figuring out the best combination of products for each retailer, implementing it, and integrating it with their back-end systems.

A presenter from one company was talking about behavioural targeting on retail websites, which his product did, and which involves detailed, specific configuration of web pages, content on those pages and even the different routes shoppers take, depending on what we know about them, and what they do. (This is a terrible definition of BT, but it’s the one he used). He said that using his company’s product meant shoppers got the right offer every time, leading to massively improved conversion, sales and profits.

Another presenter talked about how his company’s consumer review features were the most important contribution to his clients’ success: consumers loved to read what others had said, and higher sales, lower returns, better search engine optimisation all followed.

It’s clear that the claims of the vendors are largely contradictory. Buying all their products can’t be the answer. They can’t all be right! So where is a retailer to start? I think the answer is in thinking about the consumer: what customer journeys are best for the company’s product or service, for their consumers and ultimately for their retail performance? And then to design the experience around those insights, choosing the right combination of vendors to support the consumers’ journeys.

Another critical factor to consider is integration: buying a stack of products from different people is only going to make putting all the pieces together harder. There might be specific examples where buying products from multiple vendors adds value, but this needs to be balanced with the ease of implementing a suite that has been built to work together.

Finally, as one speaker was very keen to point out, renting a hosted solution, where you pay a monthly, quarterly or annual rent for a service rather than operating it yourself, makes many companies a lot more agile than they would be otherwise. In my management consulting days I would always have to remind clients to consider the “buy, build or outsource” question, and that question is even more important today than it was then, because what we can build for ourselves has become so much more complex.