Recently I got the opportunity to create a guest blog post for Amazon’s Webstore blog.
3 Reasons Your ECommerce Strategy is Stuck in Neutral
This post is really about trying to diagnose a couple of reasons why your eCommerce site’s revenue performance is not going like you think it should be.
This could become something I do more regularly so watch this space…
Well that was an interesting 6 months! It feels that long since I’ve popped my head up here.
If you’ve followed me, here’s what I’ve been up to recently…. perhaps in the style you’re used to from me. That is to say, long-winded?
1 - I’ve moved on from Barnes & Noble’s ECommerce team.
I moved to NY in part for a greater pool of opportunities and Barnes & Noble was a great option at the time I moved. Serving as GM of their Marketplace initiative taught me a lot about many different new things:
I decided to move on to a different type of challenge, but having gained a lot in the process. My best wishes to the B&N team as they continue to execute on all their digital initiatives.
2 - I’ve gotten divorced.
After 12 years of marriage, I’ve recently gotten divorced. It’s one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make and feel like I’ve grown a lot in the process.
This was an especially tough decision for me having grown up Catholic, and having such great parents that are still together, combined with grandparents that had been together 50+ years as fantastic role models.
No one goes into any marriage expecting it to end, least of all me. I tend to think I can fix any situation but ultimately decided that I had to move on with my life.
Getting used to this single thing has been a great new experience as well — it’s going well so far and I’m dating a great girl. Looking forward to a lot of new experiences.
3 - I’m still in New York!
This may seem like a surprise but given the divorce, I wasn’t tied to any particular location and seriously considered moving to the San Francisco Bay area as part of looking for a new job.
I expect to be in New York for a long while now, where a long while for me means that I’m prepared to be here 10 years. It’s kind of my default horizon.
I’m very happy with my decision to move to New York, am starting to develop a good network of friends, and it’s safe to say there will always be a lot of opportunity here.
From my reckoning, the ECommerce and technology market in New York is about 2-3x smaller than the San Francisco Bay area, but it’s also pretty clear to me that in terms of “opportunity pools for ECommerce”, NY is #2 in the United States. That’s a pretty good place to be.
And it’s on the rise. NY has not always been known for technology firms and Ecommerce — instead being known more for finance, fashion, and advertising. Technology and ecommerce is growing rapidly in NY, however. It was about 3 years ago I noticed a definite explosion of startups in the NY area that wasn’t as noticeable even 5 years ago.
It’s one of the things I liked when I first moved to the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina in 1998, but a lot of company density has migrated to Pharma and Biotech away from Technology firms — of course the old standbys like SAS, IBM/Lenovo continue to grow. NC is still a great area of the country with a fantastic quality of life.
4 - I’ve joined Merchantry!
What’s that? It’s a startup based in New York that builds online marketplace software for retailers and media companies.
Well, I can’t seem to get Marketplaces off the brain. Let’s recap:
Now I’m VP Operations for Merchantry. Operations is a bit of a catch-all title but essentially it means delivering on what the company promises and making sure the company is doing all the right things as we scale the business. It’s a fun role for me since at Barnes & Noble I was an operationally-oriented GM.
It’s really a lot of fun seeing a marketplace business from so many angles.
RE: Merchantry…. Tommaso Trionfi, the CEO there is a great guy I’ve known for a number of years now and made the transition a no-brainer. The team is energetic, very experienced with marketplaces, and we’re starting to get traction in a developing market.
All the usual startup caveats apply but all the indicators are headed in the right direction meaning it should be a fun ride. Truly looking forward to this.
If you are one of the literally dozens of people that I talked with during my recent job search, I cannot thank you enough.
5 - My speaking schedule has picked up.
Being at a major retailer makes it easier to kickstart speaking opportunities. In the retail industry, retailers are most interested in most hearing from other retailers.
Earlier this year, I spoke at ETail West in Palm Springs, as well as at the E-Commerce Summit in Barcelona.
Last month, I spoke at a panel in NY hosted by J.H. Cohn about ECommerce investments and strategy.
Last week, I hosted a roundtable at Shop.org 2012 about Launching an Online Marketplace, co-hosted with Merchantry customer Jerome Mercier, CEO of BorderLinx, which recently launched a new Marketplace called OneWorldAvenue focused on helping international markets get better access to mainstream US/UK brands. They are always looking for new suppliers so check it out particularly if you are a high-end brand — they’ve signed some interesting co-marketing deals with major credit card companies.
In the next few months, things seem to pick up even more.
Whew — as I said it’s been an interesting and productive 6 months. And it definitely explains why my time has gotten shorter in terms of blogging, tweeting, LinkedIning, etc.
- Rick
An attachment set for a mixer I don’t own.
Well heck. Blogging is becoming expensive.
About a month or so ago I wrote an entry about eBay search where I said that on Kitchenaid.com there were 85 results for mixers and on eBay there were thousands… well apparently as part of that research I put a mixer attachment in a shopping cart at Amazon. Then I went back there to buy something else (for real) and bought it at the same time without realizing it.
Grr. $50 I’ll never get back. Probably donate it someplace or give it to a friend — I don’t think I’ve ever returned a single item online. Hassle.
This leads me to wonder what % of online purchases are accidental. I’ve prevented myself at the last second from doing this once or twice before, so it must happen to others as well?
I don’t think I’ve ever actually used a mixer.
One of the reasons I enjoy blogging is I really enjoy thought experiments on businesses. This is another one of those. I choose eBay/Amazon a lot because they are both commerce leaders, visible/transparent, and so they set the standard in some ways for the industry.
One of these kids is doing his own thing, come on can you tell which one?
The proposal:
The eBay.com site and brand should become mainline retail as the primary focus and optimize around that. Liquidations and collectibles would be relegated to a sub-brand and separate experience (much like an offline retail company might do — think “Ann Taylor” and “Ann Taylor Loft”, there are literally hundreds of examples.)
Ok I’m headed to Barcelona and it should be a lot of fun.
Gaudi. All that.
Why does an ECommerce nut get to go to Barcelona? Well to talk about Marketplaces of course!
Conference: E-Commerce Summit 2012 Barcelona
Dates: June 4-6, 2012 (soon!)
Topic: Is Running a Marketplace Right for Me?
A topic near to my heart. The theme of the conference is primarily European retailers getting to hear what’s going on in the United States. I have the Marketplace session. It’s obviously a trend. I’ve been on both sides of the fence — helping retailers succeed on Marketplaces, as well as building a Marketplace at Barnes & Noble.
The things I’ll talk about — I’ve not seen them before, and you will likely never hear again. Not in this detail.
If you’ve never heard me speak before — I’m pretty transparent. I will lay out step by step my decision points coming into Barnes & Noble, what we considered, why we did it, how we did it, and most importantly if you’re a large retailer: does it make sense for you to do the same thing?
My presentation is laid out in my head already, but if you have any questions in particular you’d like me to answer, let me know and I’ll include them. After the conference, I’m happy to post the slides to Slideshare.
Folks that follow me in Europe? Feel free to drop by — I’ll be in Barcelona all week so would love to catch up.
Thanks!
- Rick
Obviously Google has had its Commerce Search for a while but this is a clear signal that Amazon is entering the game.
As far as eBay is concerned, they might need to pay attention here. X.Commerce is designed to be this fabric for all these commerce components. I did a search for “X.Commerce” and “Search” and came up empty (on Google, naturally).
If eBay’s strategy is Magento that’s one thing, but having a cloud strategy gives Amazon a decided advantage. Pretty soon (within months) someone will build a Magneto plugin which uses CloudSearch.
Probably next up is a more formal taxonomy service, built on top of any number of Amazon’s existing database solutions.
See where this is headed? Build the components first (capture developers) and then stack them together later on (integrators/ISVs).
“Oh that, idea? We’ve done that before 5 years ago! Let me save you some time.”
Being a leader is tough. Not only do you have to pick a good idea, but you have to get the execution right. It struck me the other day that many times when people move onto a new idea, org structure, whatever, they don’t have a clear picture of why the old one was not appropriate other than:
It was done by my predecessor.
There are a whole set of reasons why something fails, and only by getting the most important ones right can you succeed.
Which ones are most important to you? To success of your effort?
Often, the job of a leader is to take a failed idea - one that no one thinks will work - and with the right root cause analysis, tweak one or all of these and have it succeed.
Ever wonder what Jeff Bezos means when he says “Stubborn on vision, flexible on details?”
This is it.
Are your eyes tired? Too focused on building new things to see the pile of stuff building up in the corner?
Paypal has recently rolled out some new messaging and tiers around its products, and it hit me that the fact they are doing this is a really good external indicator for Paypal.
The reason is that it shows Paypal is looking at their business with a fresh pair of eyes.
Seems simple, but it’s not. Forever, Paypal has been a jumble of confusing terms. Paypal Websites Payment Pro. Paypal Express Checkout. Paypal Direct Payment. Paypal Payments Pro.
And this is barely counting all the things that were carried over from the Verisign acquisition. Gems like Payflow Pro and Payflow Link.
What if they wanted to add new features to this? Just throw another one on the jumbled mess of names? How do you even begin to speak about this to the market?
Answer these questions:
Engineers call this refactoring. And this is Paypal doing it to their product lines.
Close your eyes.
Remember the first time you used Google? That ‘a-ha’ moment when you felt that someone understood what sort of information was truly important to you?
If search queries are the database of intentions/wants/desires, then search results are perhaps the database of understanding.
It’s the way for a website to say, “I hear you”.
The fact that search results can inspire empathy in users is significant in the world of ECommerce — which supposedly represents the fulfillment of user needs/wants. If an ECommerce company has a search problem, they have a pretty major business concern — which brings us to today’s topic:
eBay Search.
eBay has a tough job on its hands. It has a search domain on the scale of someone like Google. Its business model, inventory source, and product relationships are completely unique in the industry.
As I thought about eBay’s options to improve that experience, I wanted to consider two paths in particular: one is to keep working and improving what they have, and the other is outsourcing.
