Next Generation Shopping

I won’t be joining the crazy people out there on Black Friday this time around. I prefer to stay in the warmth, at a safe distance away from retail stores.  I intend to do my shopping strictly online. This is why… the best I can remember it anyway:

Last year I went to Circuit City mainly for the experience, but also to pick up a Samsung 22 Inch LCD monitor since they had for a really good price (after rebate). I thought maybe I’d pickup a couple other things while I was there too. That idea got shot down about the second I entered the store, but more on that later. So the story begins, I got up early (4:30 AM?) and went to the closest Circuit City. I arrived and found some parking suprisingly. I laughed as I walked by people in tents at the front of the line. I kept walking back to the edge of the store and then I noticed that the line curled around the side of the building a few times. I wasn’t laughing anymore. I found a spot in line, at the end of the last curl. To my surprise it actually went pretty quick once the doors opened. I got inside within an hour of the store opening.  The monitors were towards the back with the computers, so I started to make my way over there

I soon noticed that there were human-created bottlenecks all over the store.  It took some forcing to get through. Once I got to the back of the store, there was a long line for the computer related items. Circuit City had set it up so that anyone looking for a computer item had to ask a store rep and then the rep had to key it into the computer. Someone else then had to go into the back and look for it. Meanwhile, everyone else had to wait for the one person. It was the worst setup I have ever seen, seriously, ever. I waited for a while and people started to get unruly. I’ll leave out the boring in-between details. After about an hour and half of not moving at all I got out of my spot, and pulled a rep over. As it turns out, they were having computer difficulties in that section to boot. I left the store a little while later with nothing but frustration.

I ended up getting the monitor (sitting on my desk now) online later that day (shortly before taking a nap). I ended getting it cheaper online because I had a gotten a gift certificate or coupon code off eBay! All that trouble for nothing!

Here is what I learned and some tips:

• It is an experience, and the idea of it is really fun. Once you get into the store the fun ends. A crowd of hungry consumers pack into the store, making any size store look miniature. Pushing and shoving begins, and fights over short-supply items. Remember to maintain composure and your end goal.
• Many of the same deals are posted online later in the day or on the following Monday (Cyber Monday). A word of warning though, many of the extremely hot or hard to get items are likely to sell out.
• Know what you want to get before you get into the store. Have a priority list and know when to cut your losses. Remember, you can probably get some of the items online later.

I’m doing a side project that involves setting up a merchant e-commerce site. What I have come to quickly realize is that there are a ton of e-commerce shopping cart solutions out there! With a small budget for the project, I was looking for something that was open source. I’ve written this article about two that grabbed my attention, and why I ended up going with a paid solution. This is in no way a complete analysis so if you are looking for more e-commerce solutions, PayPal has a great list (all PayPal enabled of course), and 411ASP.NET has a list specific to .NET.

I should mention that the majority of this write-up contains personal notes, but hopefully they are helpful to those interested (as I did do a fair amount of research). Again, the first two solutions I looked at are currently FREE and open source. The third costs $500 (Standard version), which comes with the full source code upon purchase, but isn’t open source.

Getting Started

Here are the solutions I looked at:

dashCommerce is the successor to Commerce Starter Kit, and is freely available on CodePlex. This is great for those ASP.NET developers used to working with it that wish to contribute. However, it seems to be a one man show right now as far as development. We’ll see if it can indeed keep pace with the market.

Magento Commerce is an open source PHP e-commerce solution led by Los Angelos based E-Commerce firm Varien. The solution stakes claim to unprecedented flexibility and control. You can jump into learning right away as they have a bunch of tutorial screencasts on their site.

Znode Storefront is an ASP.NET 2.0 solution that “specializes in secure, scalable e-commerce solutions driven by customer needs.”

Below are my notes on some parts I was most interested in. I have provided additional information in a tabular grid below as well.

Development Status

• Magento was recently launched in Beta and it is not recommended to use in a production environment. A functional version is in the works and Varien is shooting for Q1 2008.
• dashCommerce has just released version 2.2 and has sites in a product environment. Major changes are in order for the next version (3.0) which is slated tentatively for December 2007 / Q1 2008.
• Znode Storefront has sites and can be used in the production environment.

Community Following

• Magento seems to have the largest community following of the three. They have a Wiki section and allow the community to contribute. Continued development is by Varien.
• dashCommerce has a decent community following, but it currently seems somewhat disorganized. Community can contribute via CodePlex. Continued development is by Chris Cevyas.
• Znode, not being open source like the others, does not appear to have much of an active community. However, they seem to be dedicated to continued improvement of their product (see roadmap).

User Interface / CSS

• Magento. I’m a sucker for good lucks and that’s exactly what Magento is: Good Looking! Utilizing Scriptlicious, AJAX, and tagging it has Web 2.0 written all over it. It comes with a wide array of features “out of the box.”
• Znode has a structured CSS and Master Page system setup that seems ideal for customization. The admin area allows editing of CSS via a form Textbox similar to working in the popular Wordpress blogging software. It boasts further AJAX UI in future versions.
• dashCommerce seems to be the most messy to tailor via CSS. This should be changing in their next release, version 3.0. Read more »

During the retailer forum session at Search Engine Strategies NYC a member of the audience said “I have a store that I just started up. Right now we are in the $0 dollars sales area. What are some tips for getting started with an E-Commerce store?”

A great summary response from the panel covered a majority of the avenues for building from the ground up.

• Build links and SEO – Long term initiative, no shortcuts.
• Advertise on Search Engines (SEM) - Instant results; Testing and basic analytics is important.
• Utilize Available Services in the Shopping Vertical

• List on Google Base / Froogle - Results dependant on product being sold. 
• Sell on auction sites, specifically eBay and link back to your e-commerce store in the description – Short term
• Sell on marketplaces like Amazon zShops, or Ebay Express
• Use Yahoo! Merchant Solutions (free setup) to power the site

• Easier/Cheaper to get listed in Yahoo! Shopping search engine

• Datafeed Optimization (DFO) - Be found for more search terms.  Shorter term initiative.  (See SingleFeed for a good solution).

I’d also suggest that new merchants should try to announce some initial promotions and get free exposure through deal or coupon sites. And don’t forget getting friends and family to help spread the word.

[Entry related to the Retailer Forum session held at Search Engine Strategies 2007 NYC.]

Duplicate content issues affect a variety of webmasters including: the affiliate marketer, the mashup developer, and the E-Commerce store manager.

Here are some prime examples:

• Affiliate site with product descriptions coming from Merchant datafeeds
• Shopping mashup where the product information comes from partner(s) Web Services / APIs.
• E-Commerce store where product inventory information comes from a partner or supplier.

What do all of these scenarios have in common? They all can suffer greatly from duplicate content. If you are using a content source that is widely used, chances are your site is probably going to be seen as having duplicate content by the search engines. The best way I can tell you to look at duplicate content is by measuring your own value added. If your site is adding no further value to the content source it is generally not going to be liked by the search engines, and rightly so. From a consumer standpoint we don’t need 100 affiliate websites to appear first in Google with all the same exact content.

From what I gather there is no 100% solution. One suggestion in the session was Read more »

I’ve taken several months off of blogging to focus on other things.  However, I’ll be blogging more often starting next week.

First on the list are these topics:

• Coverage of Search Engine Strategies in NYC
• Updates on Shopping APIs
• General Industry Analysis
• Other Tidbits on Shopping Comparison, SEM, Affiliate Marketing and Related Topics

This week was my first time attending the largely popular AD:Tech conference. This year the conference had over ten-thousand attendees. While there was a ton going on at the conference, I’ll try to stick to mainly E-Commerce related topics for this post.

Two sessions really grabbed my attention. The first was titled Social Commerce: Mashing up the Web. The session boasted to be pertaining to the coming of sites after MySpace, YouTube, etc. From the description: Extending the “core elements of online social networks into more direct commercial models”. Sounded very interesting to me, but the headline title had given me a totally different first impression. My first piece of advice to the conference organizers is to be careful with the “new-age lingo” you use. Web 2.0 lingo is not strictly defined and often has vague or multiple meanings. Buzzwords are great to grab attention, but should be used carefully.

Getting to the point… You notice the titled included “mashup”. I realize this is not a developers’ conference, but when I think of mashup I think of web service integration (see mashupcamp.com or ProgrammableWeb for more information). I could tell by the list of speakers that they most likely wouldn’t mention anything about web services / APIs.

Finally… The session turned out to be very informational (but unrelated to mashups). Each panelist basically gave a marketing overview on how to reach a specific target audience and allow them to engage. Nath Freitas of Cruxy made some of the most interesting points, one of which was noted on the ADTech Blog yesterday:

“Most social sites lean heavily on the audience to build the content and evangelize. To do this, he emphasizes exposing consumers to a deeper amount of content to encourage additional engagement.”

The topic of engagement is a very important one for “social commerce”. You should not push too much content OR too much commerce in the face of your target audience. Providing a platform for the correct mixture of focused content and relevant commerce is key.

The second session was title Next Generation Strategies for E-Commerce. This was probably the most useful session I listened in on. The sessions started with some statisics compliments of JupiterResearch. Here is what I noted:

• Forecast for online shopping (2006) = $95 Billion
• Forecast for online shopping (2010) = $144 Billion
• Holiday sales (2006) are predicted to increase 18% = $32 Billion
• 50% of all transactions are influenced by online commerce

Heather Dougherty of Nielsen/NetRaings was asked what key trend stuck out in her mind. She was quick to mention the ability for users to socially “tag” shopping or product pages. She hit the nail on the head, but was at a lose for words on a term for this new phenomenon. Basically, “wishlists on steroids” she said. Some examples she mentioned were Kaboodle, Stylehive and Delicious. Let me try to put a term to that, “social bookmarking”. The trend with sites like Kaboodle, Wists and some others seem to be more of “social product lists” where users share lists of products with friends, family or the entire Internet userbase. It extends upon the old-fashioned (web 1.0 if you will) “wishlist”. I’m surprised nothing like this was brought up during the social commerce session.

Another striking fact was that having a Verisign logo on their homepage increased Audible.com purchased by 98%. That is a crazy increase, but don’t go running to add a Verisign logo to your site just yet. It is all relevant to your target audience and the product you are selling. So just focus on the moral of the presentation: Trial and error testing is critical. Let me put it this way, if you don’t try it and track comparable conversions, you won’t know what your users are most interested in.

Technorati Tags: social shopping, social commerce, adtech, ad:tech, kaboodle, stylehive, e-commerce, myspace, social bookmarking, advertising

The CSK development team recently announced that CSK beta 3 is out. And I must say, their Commerce platform, the CSK community, and their website itself looks like it is coming along quite well. I love seeing quality, open-source ASP.NET web applications. CSK is licensed under the Mozilla Public License (1.1).

They recently highlighted an e-commerce website built on CSK (1.0.2) called TieSource.com, as pictured below.

Personally I think the site looks really nice.

To followup with my previous CSK post, Dave had answered my question as I spoke with him about it briefly about CSK at Mashup Camp 2. To reiterate, my question was “Is there an easy way to calculate tax and shipping charges?”

The answer was that there is Yes, through StrikeIron web services. I believe depending on how much information you require, and how often you need to call the service it is eithier free or a charge per call. But I’ll have to double-check with him.

Technorati Tags: Commerce Starter Kit, StrikeIron, PayPal, ASP.NET

Just read on ComparisonEngines.com that the Organized Shopping Blog is back.

I used to read the Organized Shopping pretty much daily when I first began blogging about six months ago. Oddly enough (to me) the author Sean O’Rourke suddenly stopped blogging around the same time. I thought the site was done for sure, but have left a link to his site on my blog regardless since it was still a valid resource. I was beginning to word if it was a waste of space, but have been proved wrong.

I’m glad to have another good quality resource for industy perspectives.  For those of you who have never done so, it is  definitely worth checking out.

A recent article on RedHerring entitled “What’s Left to Webify?” does a good job in summarizing the Zixxo (Local Coupon Syndication) and Red Roller (Shipping Price Comparison) startups. Both companies strike me as very interesting and worth following. But don’t take my word for it, read the article for yourself.

Red Roller was one of the most interesting companies I came across at this year’s eBay Live!

Zixxo was recently selected as the top Web 2.0 Company by SuperNova and TechCrunch.

Technorati Tags: red roller, shipping comparison, local coupons, redherring, ebay live, zixxo, supernova