Category: InternetRetailing

This article appeared in November 2008’s edition of Internet Retailing Magazine.

After the buzz and positive atmosphere at the InternetRetailing 2008 Conference, Ian Jindal considers the role of ecommerce in a hostile and uncertain period for retailers: can etail’s star shine undimmed?
There’s a stunned and bruised feeling in retail. Not so much as a result of the downturn/recession/depression (delete according to pessimism) but  at the effect of the unintended consequences.

The speed and extent of the seizure of short-term lending markets has caused significant trouble to businesses who depend upon flexible working capital: growing businesses, seasonal businesses, leveraged businesses with liquidity covenants and suppliers whose working capital needs to be with retailers are all suffering. The amplified impact of retail and manufacturing workers losing confidence, buying power or even jobs will be, for the retail sector, like hitting a wall.

In retail Boardrooms across the land, all eyes are now on eCommerce. While offline like-for-like performance is down across sectors, eCommerce is still growing or at least ‘holding up’. As drowning men cleave to passing logs, so do CEOs view the online channel as an opportunity to save the financial year. Many in eCommerce, myself included, remember the nuclear winter of 2001-3: the question is what lessons have we learned and do we have the strength to apply them?

The key lesson is that this is a time for brave people to be ruthless and focused. In a rising market there’s always a “mañana” in which to implement gentlemanly improvements in segmentation, stock control, processes, addressing margin… However, there is no “tomorrow”. I know that Christmas is busy, but we must all fear that January post-sale will be even tougher. Putting off decisive action until December 31st is folly.

While each business is different, in general we can concentrate upon pace, focus, agility and responsiveness – attributes that should be a fundamental part of ecommerce.

Pace is vital since we need to trade our sites daily, not weekly or monthly. Learn lessons quickly and implement immediately. This is no time for a ‘to do’ list – you need a ‘just done’ list!

Focus must be upon customer-facing activity – help them part with their cash. Simplicity is a function of this: in merchandising, marketing and projects.

Agility is needed to move quickly and with confidence: make the changes now, not next week!

Responsiveness should be to the customer or emergent opportunities. The origin of the word ‘retail’ is from the French word “retailler” or ‘re-tailor’ – creating something anew for each customer, focused on serving them. The web’s ability to segment, personalise, algorithmically optimise and merchandise should come to the fore. Now, today – not tomorrow.

These are simple requirements, but take backbone to implement. Wibbling, waffling and waiting should be reserved for those on the sidelines.

Even with this bold, brave approach we etailers are dependent upon our colleagues in logistics for service levels, buying and merchandising to have the right goods to sell and our stores and contact centres for cross-channel leverage. The temptation is to try and forge ahead online but now more than ever is the time to work closely with colleagues to burnish a consistent service to customers across all channels. While your colleagues see ecommerce as an opportunity to rescue trading performance you have an opening to cement cross-channel working… not to show that you’re separatist, selfish and narrowly focused!

eCommerce continues to perform well, and it’s said that stars shine more brightly against a dark sky. However, our aim cannot be simply to be valued in comparison with the decline of others. eCommerce professionals have an opportunity in the coming months to demonstrate a robust and agile commercialism and to lift the whole business by customer focus, modern inclusive working practices and delivering the multichannel leverage of which we speak so often.

In these dark times it takes bravery to be brilliant and simplicity to sparkle. eCommerce should be a constellation, not a lone star: this Christmas,  don’t twinkle alone.

Having won a temporary pass from IR Towers to a seaside retreat with cable TV, Ian Jindal is watching Olympic synchronised diving as the rain beats against the windows and thinking of peak season…The Olympics are an extraordinary event. Not solely for the obvious (and barely-understood) commitment and expertise of the athletes but for the emergence of a new form of human being: Homo Potatum Sofum Expertatis, sometimes known by its common name, the ‘couch potato’.

Being inactive while watching telly is not that remarkable. Rather, it’s the peculiar quadrennial transformation into a sporting expert that defies accepted ideas of evolution. I’d never seen synchronised diving before, but I can note with great accuracy the differences in body line, the perfection of the piked position and the miniscule timing differences in breaking the surface… Humans have evolved to be able to identify tiny differences in patterns, even if most of us lack the ability to make our bodies work to those fine tolerances.

My mind slipped back to thinking about retail, and I realised that the armchair critic is no match for the uncaring, critical, always-right customer!

In the battle to extract cash from the recession-constricted wallets of our visitors etailers are resorting to a near-permanent sale, free delivery, deeper additional discounts… and all the while Christmas is coming and we need to gear up for peak.

Is this our Olympic relay race? We have the highly-honed and much practised disciplines of logistics, buying, marketing and technology, all at peak form after over 4 years of “working” ecommerce. However, if the team play and baton-passing is not the equal of the individuals then the customer notices. “98% performance”” gains no credit for the hard work and expertise: rather, the ‘2% deficit’ is noticed and punished.

Characteristic of the ‘mature stage of ecommerce’ is that customers have now experienced expertise – either from you or (painfully) from your competitors. Unfortunately, the expert etailer gets little explicit praise, save for an increased retention and net promoter [tm] ranking. That retailer’s competitors however suffer silently – the silence of being shunned. Customer may still come to your site, from habit, curiosity or expensive CPA tactics but upon arrival your site suddenly seems to lack lustre, that certain Gold Medal je ne sais quoi, the allure of the champion. Second division. Vauxhall Conference. Amateur.

The first symptom of underperformance is a perplexing drop in conversion rates. Blame the recession, blame holidays, wait for the new season’s stock, fire up another affiliate… Somehow, though, the medal positions are always filled by your competitors… While we all clap politely and are pleased with ecommerce’s resilience – the ‘rise in popularity of our sport’, if you will – it’s of zero consolation to the true competitor, for whom it’s medals or nothing.

With peak season imminent, what are our options? The first point is not to start anything new or risky: this is a time for a perfect drill rather than a  practice match. The next is to coach each of your skilled players in working to their maximum capabilities – practice at peak enables performance at peak. Finally, make sure that your training camp includes cross-discipline practice and communication. With high pressure and high stakes it’s all too easy for people to fall back into their own areas and leave the overall problem to ‘someone else’. But as Potatus Expertatis knows, it’s the tiny cracks and flaws that mark the teams down from gold, rather than the the flashes of isolated brilliance moving them up.

Peak success will be from Gold-standard teams, working flawlessly and consistently together to deliver under pressure against the etailing elite. No amount of free delivery and empty promises can win the Christmas Olympics.

To the victor the spoils.

This was my Editorial from the July 2008 issue of Internet Retailing magazine.

The paradigm of the web channel being a vast shop with elastic walls has run its course. As Ian Jindal packs his bucket and spade for the summer holidays, he considers a new etailing paradigm: active selling in the network age. Retailers have managed the web for too long – our customers want it back!

This is a great idea. It’s become axiomatic that there’s a skills-shortage in ecommerce, but a less-well documented problem with the explosion in ecommerce is the lack of entry-level, junior skills.

Such has been the growth that experienced ecommerce people are now looking at senior management paygrades, but there’s not been the investment within companies to grow the skills of young, generalist people, or those from other disciplines, to become the ecommerce practicioners of next year.

This initiative answers two problems for businesses:

1. accredited, dependable training – you’ll have confidence that the graduates have covered the bases
2. there’s a critical mass for recruiting (much easier than a ‘spray and pray’ approach to attracting junior staff).

What will the graduates do?

“What’s included for free on our Graduate Academy:

• 3 day residential training placement in July at Reading University
• 15 days of distance and online training during August
• A further 2 days residential training at the end of August at Reading University
• Free access to www.e-consultancy.com for the period of training
• Guaranteed interviews with leading companies”

We’ll take a look at the progress of the Academy in more detail in InternetRetailing, but in the meantime this is a very welcome initiative and sure to be oversubscribed.

Graduate Academy | Training | E-consultancy.com

InternetRetailing‘s Editor in Chief, Ian Jindal, has been shopping hard this month and his experience at the sharp end of retail (handing over cash, rather than writing strategies) has made him ponder how retailers should respond to anticipated ‘percentage declines’ in sales.Thanks to client engagements your Editor in Chief has had the opportunity to pound the malls, boutiques and ateliers of Hong Kong, London, New York and Manchester – all in the space of high carbon-footprint month. During my travels I’ve been both demonstrating best practice rich internet applications and spending times in some truly extraordinary retail venues – from the highest end of luxury outlets and malls in Hong Kong through discount and scale retailers in NYC, where luxury and mass-markets collide, and niche, one-outlet custom retailers in the UK. As a backdrop to this till-gazing my newsfeeds have kept me in touch with the statistics: ongoing fears of a consumer recession; growth in online sales over the Christmas season that show the channel taking an ever-greater proportion of retail sales and a mix of retail results, with some winners and a few losers whose sales have declined.

In my conversations with retailers there’s a general agreement that the “consumer situation” is going to be difficult through 2008 and that spring trading won’t help fashion retailers enough (after all, Spring/Summer goods have a lower cash value that the big winter coats and back to school outfits) and the electronics retailers lack a compelling product – no Xbox/Wii launch, no new operating system, no radical shift in computer power or screen technology. Even the DVD format war has fizzled to a conclusion.

In all, retailers are looking to proceed with caution, eye promotional activity and keen pricing as their lodestone in the difficult currents ahead – looking to steady sales or have a ‘managed decline’ while protecting margins. In a word – incrementalism.

I fear, though, that such stoicism and incrementalism will not serve retailers well: there’s no such thing as an average decline.

Customer behaviour is binary: they either buy or they do not. It’s not as if – faced by a reduced amount of free cash – a customer simply decides to spend £97 instead of £100. Clearly, retailer discounting may give that appearance (ie if we reduce prices) but the more worrying situation is that customers simply do not buy at all from us: a 100% discount!

This was obvious to me as I eavesdropped on the faithful in four different Apple stores fondling the new MacBook Air. Even early adopters acknowledge that the machine is underpowered but its impact is clear: it makes other options look undesirable and customers will wait for the ‘version 2’ rather than spend now or on an alternative. The message for rival products is “we don’t want it” not “we can’t afford it”.

Likewise, for clothing. Recent reports show that customer aspirations remain high even when cash is tight. The observed behaviour is that they’ll continue to buy high-end goods, but in lower quantities, and would fund the purchases by eschewing other non-essential purchases (ie reduced overall sales for the high end, zero sales at the lower end: no ‘average’ in sight!).

Luxury etailers, however, should not take this custom for granted. A quantitative survey by Conchango this month (covered on our portal) shows a catalogue of basic errors and shoddy customer experience. 30% of ordered goods did not arrive, and from a total score of 190 Estee Lauder (the best) only managed 109 and Dior held up the bottom with a lowly 56 (goods didn’t arrive).

The lessons from this are clear, obvious – and generally ignored. Back your products and marketing with great logistics.

The more difficult lesson though is to look through the aggregate behaviour of 100 customers and consider the unique experience of each of them: if we fail to communicate, inspire and delight then the customers’ wallets will stay firmly in their pockets. Aggregate percentage shifts in the market will disguise the fact that some retailers will take lots of money and others will see sales fall off a cliff.

A gynaecologist friend once remarked, one cannot be “99% pregnant” – you either are or you’re not. Likewise with retail in 2008: there’s no ‘99% successful’ – you’ll either make the sale or you won’t. In 2008 etail sales will need to be personal, and etailers must act accordingly.

Google has recently added a “UK Retail” resource to its iGoogle offering. This is more than a collection of retail-specific feeds from the existing Google database. Google has worked directly with key information providers to ensure that the feeds provided are relevant, correctly formatted, useful for retail ‘watchers’ and provide a good mass of information. From a publisher’s perspective the new zone offers improved branding (over and above a reader just adding the RSS feed to their own iGoogle account).

Follow the link above (click on the image) to get to a page that shows the widgets I’m running on my iGoogle page. Clearly, I’m promoting the Internet Retailing one (ahem), but there are some very useful other ones – the Comscore live “Top 15” table, and the Hitwise Top10s.

This is a useful ‘radar’ for retail and etail activities, I reckon, but I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts.