Social commerce includes a variety of tools and platforms to help drive a more personalized, interactive shopping experience for consumers.  The lion's share of the attention today is on social networks- particularly Facebook commerce - but other social tools exist that can engage and ultimately help convert and retain customers.  One of these includes blogging, which most retailers have incorporated as part of their marketing strategy in some way.  Sustaining a blogging effort, including keeping it interactive for the shopper and tying it to the brand's various touchpoints with consumers, can be challenging.  However, if done right, it could help improve customer engagement as well as online revenue.

Below are some suggested ways in which online retailers can make blogging more social commerce ready.

Shoppable Images and Links

Blog content often mentions products and then links directly to the details page on the commerce site. By making the featured product shoppable directly from the blog, whether it be from within an article, a comment or an embedded image within the blog, it will allow the product to be more easily shopped since the consumer doesn't have to leave the site itself to get to those product details.

Blogging SEO Boost

Blogging can assist with search engine optimization (SEO) by creating more crawlable content for search engines to index and serve up on results pages.  However, the metadata associated with the product must be embedded as part of the blog page itself rather than being pulled in dynamically in real time.  

Sharing to Blog

Social sharing includes not only sharing to Facebook and Twitter, but also to blogs.  Making it easier for consumers to one-click publish from product detail pages to their blogging platform helps to encourage them to blog about your product or brand.  Widgets such as Share This can be embedded on web pages and allow for easy sharing to different blogging platforms, such as Wordpress, Blogger, Tumblr and others. 

Blog Reviews

User-generated content (UGC) is a powerful way to assist shoppers in understanding more about products, as well as increase the likelihood of purchase. Just as ratings and reviews, number of Facebook Likes, Tweets, and other UGC are displayed on product detail pages, blog posts themselves that pertain to products could likewise be displayed. A link to the blog post, along with the blog title and even a description could be displayed like in the example below:

Blogging + Mobile

Shoppers use social capabilities through mobile devices at a very high rate, so making sure blogging efforts are ready for mobile devices is key. For instance, making sure your retail blog is mobile optimized (most blogging platforms like Wordpress supply templates that are already mobile web optimized), as well as can be shopped easily from the mobile device, are things to keep in mind.  Likewise, allow for mobile-optimized blog reviews and sharing capabilities on your mobile website in addition to ratings & reviews and social sharing to Facebook, Twitter and other social networks that you may already have enabled on mobile.

The Demandware WordPress Plug-In

Demandware has made it easy for retailer's to make their retail blog social commerce ready.  As part of Demandware Labs, we released a Wordpress plug-in that allows retailers to tag blog content with product information from the Demandware Commerce platform, as well as make it easier for the product to be found online through improved SEO.  

Products can be searched by product ID or by product name/keyword and tagged (with a shortcode) directly in-line from the WordPress platform, as seen here:

The WordPress plug-in works on any WordPress blog version 3.0 or higher and is easy to install and set up.  Retailers can also easily extend and customize the Wordpress plugin to meet their particular needs. Check out the demo below to learn more and view the official press release.

 By choosing to view this video on YouTube, you will be leaving Demandware, Inc.'s website to view this video. Demandware assumes no responsibility for information or statements you may encounter on the Internet outside of Demandware's website.

Demandware customers can download the Wordpress Plug-in and begin using it today.  

Additional Reading:

• How Tory Burch is Making Shopping More Social
• Beyond Free Shipping: Facebook Credits for the Social Retailer
• Integrating Facebook into Your eCommerce Strategy

 About the Author:

Gary Lombardo manages mobile, multichannel and social commerce product marketing for Demandware.  He tweets @garylombardo

Starting at about 12pm EST on Wednesday, February 1, 2012, Home Depot needed to bring their site down for between 14-18 hours to upgrade to a new version of their ecommerce platform. The news of the site being down resulted in several articles within the trade press discussing the "event," including one from Frank Hayes at StorefrontBacktalk who wrote a very interesting take on the event and how customers were being sent in circles while the site was down.

The question I have is how did this downtime actually benefit Home Depot's consumers and why did they schedule it during the middle of the day?



Given seasonality and peak days/times to shop, these numbers are certainly not exact, but let's think about the revenue that they potentially lost. According to the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, The Home Depot had 2010 web sales of $550,000,000. On average that is $1,506,849 per day. If they were down for 18 hours, that's around $1,000,000 in lost sales. Add that to whatever costs were incurred for this new software version including implementation, labor costs, new infrastructure, etc., and that's a pretty hefty price tag for an upgrade.

When I first heard about the scheduled maintenance, I thought that maybe it would come with loads of new functionality and a magical way that means they'll never have to upgrade again (we all know that's not the case with licensed software). But, from what I could see, aside from some very minor aesthetic changes, not much or nothing at all was really changed on the site; no new shopping tools, no change in site layout; the same or similar recommended products and no major catalog updates were visible.

Below are the images of the Home Depot homepage before it went down for maintenance and then after. As you can see, they're almost identical. Same content slots, same promotions, same navigation. The only differences I noticed are some of the products have been changed and there is now an "Add to Cart" button under the recommended products. Otherwise, I can't tell the difference, can you?



                                   Before Upgrade                                                   After Upgrade 

So why did the entire site have to come down in the middle of the day?

I am sure there are improvements with the new platform regarding stability and feature-set, but from a consumer's viewpoint, it doesn't make sense and it created a big inconvenience. Everyone understands that at times websites have issues and they need to be fixed. Consumers may also understand that to gain new functionality may require taking down a site for maintenance (especially in a licensed on-premise software model). As a consumer all I ask for is some noticeable improvement in my shopping experience.

We've seen other major outages from retailers such as American Eagle and Target among others over the past year and it makes you wonder when retailers and brands will stop acting as if they are software companies and just focus on what they do best (more importantly on what will drive revenue) – merchandising and marketing.

Adam Forrest recently wrote the blog post "Stuck in Cement – 5 Barriers to Innovation with Licensed Software" in which he referenced a Forrester Research report (download report) that brings to focus the difficulty of managing licensed software for companies in fast-moving, consumer-centric industries and the incredible barriers they provide to ongoing innovation. In his article, he shares five barriers to innovation that retailers are faced with when choosing the licensed software approach.  

My advice to retailers and brands -- you don't need to be stuck in cement anymore. In this day and age, it doesn't make sense to try to manage your entire IT infrastructure on your own while also trying to focus on marketing and merchandising. Downtime for upgrades? That should be a thing of the past and instead done seamlessly and continuously.

One thing I know for sure, Lowes was probably very happy about the outage.

Additional Reading

• "Stuck in Cement" – 5 Barriers to Innovation with Licensed Software
• 4 Reasons Why On-Demand Matters
• The Future of Commerce is Digital Commerce Management (DCM)

For more information on Demandware and Digital Commerce Management, visit http://www.demandware.com and http://bit.ly/DW_DCM

About the Author

 Jeff Brandimarte is an integral part of the product marketing team at Demandware with expertise in sales enablement and competitive positioning. Jeff can be found tweeting at @JBrandimarte 

Disclaimer: By clicking on any of the hyperlinks included in this article you will leave Demandware, Inc.'s website. Demandware assumes no responsibility for information or statements you may encounter on the Internet outside of Demandware's website.

The Account Development group over here at Demandware is in contact with ecommerce leaders at retailers and brands each and every day. During these conversations, we have the opportunity to hear, first-hand, the frustrations and successes that folks in the market experience. It's the voice of the market or, as we call it, "The Digital Commerce Frontlines."    

During these conversations, we hear a lot of the "what if's" these VP's of ecommerce and folks who play a role in the world of online retail are concerned with. Some what if's that stick out for me include: 

- What if we could roll out multiple country-specific sites without having to wait months or even years to do so?

- What if our consumers could shop and buy our products from a multitude of channels such as smartphone, tablet or in-store kiosk?

- What if we didn't have to feel held hostage by our ecommerce vendor?

- What if we didn't have to build in-house to try to have control?

- What if a developer wasn't required to make a simple merchandising change?

- What if we could sell online in Asia – quickly and easily?

Working with the many retailers and branded manufacturers over the years who have selected the Demandware Commerce platform to power their ecommerce strategies, we've enjoyed watching these what-if's evolve from just a simple question to reality. 

For example, we just announced that Deckers Outdoor Group leveraged Demandware Commerce to power the online and mobile commerce storefronts for its global brands including:  UGG Australia, Teva, Sanuk, Ahnu and TSUBO across multiple geographies in the United States, Netherlands, United Kingdom and Canada.

Their big "what if" was whether or not they would be able to replace its home-grown platform with one that fit its requirements to manage multiple brands, expand into new geographies and maintain in-house control over merchandising, development, and branding. That "what if" became a reality and Deckers was able to quickly launch its multiple branded sites and, in the first week, recognized an immediate increase in customer engagement and conversion upon switching to Demandware, including a 14 percent increase in conversion on UGGAustralia.com.

 Got a What If?

If you have your own what if that you would like us to address, feel free to send it along at blog@demandware.com.

Stay tuned for more updates from the "Frontlines" team as they share some of their daily observations and advice for all of you on the digital commerce frontlines.

 About the Author

Kate Mitchell is senior manager, account development at Demandware, Inc. where she works on the  frontline each and every day talking to retailers and brands about their commerce strategies.

Disclaimer: By clicking on any of the hyperlinks included in this article you will leave Demandware, Inc.'s website. Demandware assumes no responsibility for information or statements you may encounter on the Internet outside of Demandware's website.

In the mafia world, cement shoes symbolize that you are destined to swim with the fishes. In the fast-pace world of digital commerce, licensed software leads to a brand destined to do just the same. A recent Forrester Research paper "Stuck In Cement: When Packaged Apps Create Barriers To Innovation" brings to focus the difficulty of managing licensed software for companies in fast-moving, consumer-centric industries and the incredible barriers they provide to ongoing innovation.

Unfortunately in the ecommerce world, when you are stuck in cement – all your customers see it.  Case in point - Home Depot with their recent outage due to an upgrade, Target with its multiple outages after its site redesign, and American Eagle with its eight day outage during the back-to-school rush in 2010. 

These painful examples can be summed up with the following five barriers to innovation with enterprise licensed software:

1. Packaged apps are not really all that packaged. According to the Forrester Research paper - one committed licensed software customer said, "'The problem is that packaged apps are not really very well packaged.' Multiple installations with different software versions make the problem worse. But most of all, it takes too much time — and way too much work — to show value."
2. High total cost of ownership and slow ROI. With enterprise licensed software, there are incredible upfront costs – software, hardware, hosting, and implementation to customize that not so packaged app.  According to the Forrester report, 87% of those surveyed cited that the problem of high total cost of ownership with enterprise license software was either important or very important to their business. The reports goes on to say, "Forrester data has indicated that it usually takes five to seven years for large IT investments to produce substantial returns, because it typically takes that long for companies to make the organizational changes needed to capitalize on the new technology. "
3. Time to upgrade, effort to upgrade, cost to upgrade. To most ecommerce executives - planning, implementing and paying for upgrades have just been a cost of doing business. On February 1, 2012 the Home Depot ecommerce site was closed for multiple hours in order to upgrade to the next version of their licensed software. And, unfortunately to the Home Depot customer, after all was said and done, it looks like nothing has significantly changed – it was just an inconvenience.
4. Site uptime and reliability is a hot potato, the brand is left holding the bag. When retailers and brands purchase enterprise licenses, they also need to purchase hosting and management of the infrastructure. But, when the site goes down, who is responsible? The software vendor, the hardware vendor, the hosting facility, the management firm, or the brand?  Over the years consumers have been exposed to colossal outages resulting in frustrated shoppers and canned executives - American Eagle (down for 8 days) and Target (Missoni outage fiasco) both learned this lesson the hard way.
5. No vested interest in the success of the vendor/brand relationship. Unfortunately in the world of licensed software the license transaction and signature is the ultimate moment in the relationship. After the transaction, there is no significant vested interest in getting sites live, or generating more revenue to the retailer or brand. The vendor is interested in only selling additional modules, seats, and licenses.

What's the Alternative?

If you read this blog often and are familiar with Demandware's SaaS-based commerce model, it will come as no surprise that we don't believe your destiny needs to include cement shoes. We envision a world where retailers are free to focus on running and growing their business, not managing software, upgrades and infrastructure. This methodology and vision could be the reason why leading brands such as Land's End, UGG Australia, House of Fraser, Barneys New York, and Columbia have selected the Demandware Model to power their commerce strategy.

To learn more about the Demandware Model and what makes us different, visit our website and also download your own copy of Forrester Research's paper "Stuck in Cement: When Packaged Apps Create Barriers to Innovation."

Additional Reading

• 4 Reasons Why On-Demand Matters
• The Death of Traditional POS
• The Future of Commerce is Digital Commerce Management (DCM)
• The Age of the Retail Renaissance

About the Author

Adam Forrest manages product marketing for Demandware and can be reached at aforrest (at) demandware (dot) com and he tweets at @adammwoods

Disclaimer: By clicking on any of the hyperlinks included in this article you will leave Demandware, Inc.'s website. Demandware assumes no responsibility for information or statements you may encounter on the Internet outside of Demandware's website.

In tech circles, we often throw around the term web. For just a moment, picture an actual web – not a virtual one, but something you can see and touch. On that web, there are multiple starting and ending points. There are numerous points of intersection.

Now think about ecommerce, and all of the points of intersection between brands and consumers. Consumers want to connect with a brand in the most convenient ways possible: call centers, mobile, online, in-store, and more. New points of connection continue to emerge. To further complicate this web, consumers may jump from one touch point to another within any given transaction, and they expect that the ball doesn't get dropped.

 Even as retailers adapt to satisfy customer expectations across channels, they also intend to drive sales by servicing the customer differently depending on the point of interaction. For instance, a brand may offer a web-only special that doesn't apply to in-store purchases. Isolated channel strategies cannot effectively retain core branding elements and successfully integrate marketing, merchandising, sales, and service.

 Channel management is where the brand and the customer meet. It allows a tailored experience to a particular device, running off a common set of functionality (general commerce features) with incremental functionality added per channel. 

 Why is this important?

 There are features and functions that brands will deploy that are universal to all shopping experiences, regardless of device.  No developer should need to implement the same functionality multiple times for each channel.  That just doesn't scale!  Each channel should and can operate with its own styling and incremental functionality that is unique to that channel while still maintaining a base code that is consistent across all channels. This model provides the greatest leverage of code (and functionality) reuse.

 Effective channel management also gives brands the control to manage and integrate the consumer experience across all applications, channels and devices. It integrates inventory, purchasing history, marketing, and customer services on any device. As part of a Digital Commerce Management (DCM) strategy, channel management allows customers to browse and make purchases across multiple devices, while segmenting across demographics or devices to drive business goals.

 Channel management is changing the way brands can orchestrate the customer experience. Here's how:

• One person is able to create the experience everywhere
• Speed and reaction time is increased when a brand wants to introduce a new touch point or modify an existing touch point
• The merchant is completely in control (i.e., more profitable) and is able to deliver a more cohesive consumer experience

 "The Digital Directives" calls for vendors to fundamentally change their traditional engagement and delivery models and partner in a more meaningful, strategic and sustainable way. DCM is our answer to that challenge. Channel management is an integral component of a DCM strategy, as it helps retailers break out of channel silos and streamline business processes so that the consumer has a more engaging and rich relationship with the brand. It's a brand new concept, one that will soon turn from part of the DCM roadmap to a new way and better way of choreographing all of the points where brands and consumers meet.

About the Author:

  Jamus Driscoll is senior VP of marketing for Demandware with a passion for start-up technology marketing, product positioning and messaging, creative solutions to challenges and sharing his big-picture views on the changes in digital commerce.   

For more information on Demandware and Digital Commerce Management, visit http://www.demandware.com and http://bit.ly/DW_DCM

Other articles you might also be interested in reading:

• 4 Reasons Why On-Demand Matters
• The Death of Traditional POS
• The Age of the Retail Renaissance

Disclaimer: By clicking on any of the hyperlinks included in this article you will leave Demandware, Inc.'s website. Demandware assumes no responsibility for information or statements you may encounter on the Internet outside of Demandware's website.

Digital consumers expect a seamless and personalized shopping experience no matter how they engage with a retailer. The consumer is king and dramatically driving technology innovation and retailers are trying to keep up. According to a survey conducted by Forrester Research, 87 percent of retailers acknowledged they have to improve their existing multi-channel capabilities to serve this new and digital consumer(1) but many struggling to do so.

This is where Digital Commerce Management (DCM) can help. DCM is an open strategy that enables organizations to deliver seamless brand engagement and capitalize on revenue opportunities across channels, applications, and devices. It contains five imperatives that must be addressed within the application, data, and infrastructure ecosystem to successfully fulfill brand engagement at a pace that matches consumer expectations – today and tomorrow.

On Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 2:00pm ET, our very own Rob Garf, VP of product and solutions marketing for Demandware will be joining fellow industry thought leaders, William Band of Forrester Research and Chris Hooven of OSF Global Services for a live webinar to discuss how retailers can enhance digital commerce and provide seamless brand engagement.

During the webinar, "Ecommerce and Back Office Integration: Building a Robust User Experience" Rob, William and Chris will also discuss how to:  

•    Address business and data integration challenges
•    Avoid common infrastructure and workflow issues related to integration
•    Transform transactions into a seamless and engaging experience for your customers
•    Deliver scalability and business capacity for future growth
•    Increase administration efficiency while reducing costs

Whether you are in the early stages of an online store or you are looking to expand your current ecommerce business, register today for this free webinar and gain practical advice that will start you on your way to achieving a fully integrated, world-class e-business.

For more DCM-related articles check out these below:

• The Future of Commerce is Digital Commerce Management
• The Age of the Retail Renaissance
• Retailers Deliver First-Ever Mandate to Commerce Technology Providers with "The Digital Directives"

 For more information on Demandware visit http://www.demandware.com

Disclaimer: By clicking on any of the hyperlinks included in this article you will leave Demandware, Inc.'s website. Demandware assumes no responsibility for information or statements you may encounter on the Internet outside of Demandware's website.

2011 was hailed as the Year of Mobile Commerce. Yet only 61 percent of the retailers we surveyed in February offered a mobile site or mobile application for consumers. Retailers that do not have a mobile-optimized website or application stand to lose potential consumers who are using a mobile device to shop. Consequently, those retailers risk losing online sales. When taking the plunge into mobile, the investment a retailer makes now needs to grow as the retailer's mobile strategy grows.

When deciding how to "go mobile," choose a model that provides the three F's: Functionality, Flexibility and aFfordability (okay, we could have said 'Fordability, but you wouldn't have understood, and we would have lost the coolness of the F factor).

• Functionality: Many retailers took the route of creating a proxy site or a screen scraping approach for their mobile website and are now realizing the limitations of that approach. In contrast to that approach, we believe retailers are better served by building their mobile website natively on top of a mobile commerce platform that has robust ecommerce capabilities from a provider who has a proven record of success. Doing so will allow a retailer to more readily adapt to current and future mobile functionality, instead of being limited by a potentially immature platform or proxy of the retailer's site.

• Flexibility: Mobile sites need to be flexible enough to be changed, customized and extended in a self-service manner by the retailer, without the added time and expense of relying on a service provider to make changes. The platform chosen should provide a fully flexible model: from an intuitive user interface for business users to make changes to the mobile website to an integrated developer environment and open APIs for deeper level integration, if needed.

• aFfordability: Mobile commerce websites can and should be affordable to build and maintain. Just like traditional ecommerce websites, mobile commerce websites require the retailer to consider two costs: implementation cost and on-going software costs. Implementation costs should be limited to a one-time fee instead of requiring on-going implementation fees each time a change is made. Similarly, on-going software costs should be aligned with how a retailer makes money and achieve success, so on-going costs are incurred only as online mobile revenue grows.

Mobile helps retailers manage commerce and deliver customer experiences – two of the technology imperatives outlined in our Digital Commerce Management (DCM) framework. As mobile continues to play an increasingly important role in commerce, DCM propels mobile into a fully integrated, strategic component of retailer's overall ecommerce environment. Retailers can manage mobile with full control as part of a cross-channel merchant environment, providing a consistent, timely and relevant experience across consumer devices like feature phones, smartphones and tablets.

Frederick's of Hollywood is a great example of how a mobile strategy can quickly and effectively meet the needs of shoppers and drive sales. When Frederick's determined that customer engagement and shopping patterns for mobile shoppers differed from non-mobile shoppers, they sought a preconfigured platform that could be customized to integrate with their regular ecommerce site. Frederick's already used Demandware's commerce platform for its ecommerce site, and implementation of Frederick's new mobile site took about three weeks. Data on pricing, promotions and customers is consistent across both sites, however Frederick's is able to manage the mobile site independently, for example, by featuring different content or promotions on the mobile site. The new mobile site significantly increased Frederick's mobile conversion rates.

These results – which are quickly becoming the norm for retailers and brands that do mobile well – show that, while 2011 might have been the Year of Mobile Commerce, mobile is definitely here to stay.

Can't get enough about mobile commerce?  Here are some other articles you will want to check out:

Preparing for the New World of Multichannel Commerce

5 Technologies That Will Change How Consumers Shop

So You've Got a Mobile Commerce Site, Now What?

About the Author:

Gary Lombardo leads Commerce Solutions marketing at Demandware. As part of his role, he helps retailers navigate the world of multichannel, mobile and social commerce. Gary tweets @garylombardo and can be reached via email at glombardo at demandware dot com.

For more information on Demandware and Digital Commerce Management, visit http://www.demandware.com and http://bit.ly/DW_DCM

Disclaimer: By clicking on any of the hyperlinks included in this article you will leave Demandware, Inc.'s website. Demandware assumes no responsibility for information or statements you may encounter on the Internet outside of Demandware's website.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can play a critical role in the success of online marketing compared to other programs because of the nature of the search engine itself. The search engine is a pure "pull" marketing channel that doesn't need to attract a shopper's attention or interest. A searcher simply has a certain need (desire) that he or she wants to fulfill by taking a certain action, i.e. clicking on a search engine result and/or purchasing the product. So if we think about the old-school AIDA (attention, interest, desire, action) formula, SEO doesn't need attention or interest – which explains the relatively high click through rates (CTR) compared to other channels.

SEO is often viewed as a mystery. In fact, there are certainly many "SEO experts" who seem to know everything about the topic and promise to demystify it all (and boost your organic rankings for a fee, of course). The truth is that search engine algorithms are not publicly disclosed and nobody knows exactly what it takes to reach the No. 1 position for a given keyword, creating great uncertainty among site owners. To move from confusion to focused action, it's important to understand the driving factors affecting rankings.

Search Engine Basics
The first thing any online marketer needs to understand is how search engines work. They mainly consist of three major components:

• Crawler/Bot/Spider
• Database
• Algorithm

At a basic level, the crawler software program follows links and indexes content on web pages. The crawled content is collected and stored in a database. The content in the database, plus the popularity determined by links and social relevance, is analyzed by an algorithm that ranks that Web page for a certain keyword.

If you're planning a SEO project, you must first choose a search engine for your campaign. Google dominates the worldwide search-engine landscape. However, Google is not as dominant in Eastern Europe and Asia, where Yandex (in Russia) and Baidu (in China) have major presences.

Off-page SEO is the most critical part of any SEO strategy. Relying on nice URLs and keyword-rich content only takes you so far. It will not result in consistently high, sustainable rankings in a competitive environment.

To learn more about how you can improve search engine ranking, download the full whitepaper "Improve Search Engine Ranking with Off-Page Optimization," which provides the steps needed for online retailers implement a solid SEO strategy.

In the meantime, below are some key SEO best practices for online retailers: 

• Get the technical infrastructure correct – URLs, meta information, sitemap, and coding – during implementation. This is usually a one-time effort.

• Know your keywords from a traffic and conversion perspective – brand, generic, and product.

• Create quality content for your entire website – on the home page, category pages, product pages, and non-transactional pages.

• Only after you've completed these three steps should you focus on link-building.

• Focus on the quality of links – not quantity.

• Increase your link popularity through various methods and do not rely on only one.

• Link as deeply as possible to relevant content. If you don't have relevant content for the keyword, create content before creating/optimizing the link.

• Good anchor text is your friend. The worst case is to use your company name.

• Link-building is ongoing work. Plan some link-building time each month.

• Work on your social strategy and create buzz about your site through viral campaigns.

• Reuse any relevant content (videos, presentations, pictures) and post it on relevant portals.

• Hire an agency with a proven track record in off-page optimization and also have at least one talented SEO expert in-house.

Finally, always keep in mind the SEO pyramid (below) when developing and executing your strategy. First do the technical and content fundamentals before focusing on off-page optimization.

To learn more about how you can improve search engine ranking, download the full whitepaper "Improve Search Engine Ranking with Off-Page Optimization," which provides the steps needed for online retailers implement a solid SEO strategy.

About the Author:

Lars Rabe is the Director, European Retail Practice for Demandware.

For more information on Demandware and Digital Commerce Management, visit http://www.demandware.com and http://bit.ly/DW_DCM

Want more digital commerce best practices? You got it! Visit our free resource center today to download away!

After you've made the difficult decision to overhaul your commerce site, the next quandary you're likely to face is what kind of commerce platform will be best for your business.

Simply stated, if you are planning to adapt to consumers' ever-changing technological devices and behaviors, and you don't want to be frozen in time once you complete your overhaul, you seriously need to consider an on-demand commerce platform.

Let's take a look at four reasons why on-demand should matter to you – and your consumers:

1. Innovate at your own pace: With the right cloud-based commerce technology, you can continuously develop new ways to enhance consumers' experiences, regardless of where they are located or how they're interacting with your brand. New features and capabilities are frequently and continually added to your platform and delivered in real time, so there's no need to freeze your business activities while waiting for the next upgrade. More importantly, you don't have to ask for the upgrade – or pay someone to do it. You can then leverage these new features and capabilities as you prioritize them for your business needs.

2. Control – and change – your merchandising strategy: The beauty of SaaS-based commerce platforms is that you have the ability to merchandise the way you want to, without requiring a third-party to make the change for you. There are no external change cycles. You have the power to control the things that are most important to your business when it is most important to your business and with the partners you choose for your business. So, while your competitors' requests are waiting in a queue, go ahead, change today's prices or product bundle, and switch up your recommendations, promotions, and search ranking while you're at it.

3. Open your site up to new possibilities: Openness is key to a successful, on-demand platform. While SaaS-based commerce sites provide you with the benefit of being able to innovate at your own pace, no one entity can keep up with consumers' demands alone. With open commerce platforms, you can invite other partners and developers to add to your robust offering of capabilities and content to keep the experience fresh and unique, and ensure consumers keep coming back for more. Open platforms have the ability to develop an ecosystem of innovators that bring important and complementary additions that you can easily plug into your environment.

4. Sit back and enjoy your "Oprah moment": Every merchandiser dreams of that magic moment when their business changes forever and consumers start clamoring at their doors, but most cringe when they contemplate how their website will react to a deluge of traffic. Those oft-unpredictable occurrences can be overwhelmingly exciting and incredibly stressful at the same time, but if you're on a SaaS-based platform, you can sit back and enjoy the show. An on-demand platform provider can efficiently respond to this heightened traffic and efficiently allocate additional capacity when the need occurs. A license-based application hosting provider might need weeks – and costly hardware – to manage this possible surge in traffic, and it is still a guess as to how much is enough and if the application will scale even if provided with additional amounts of hardware.

We recently announced Digital Commerce Management (DCM), a framework that:

• Serves as our product strategy
• Drives consumer interaction and loyalty
• Helps organizations manage their digital commerce operations.

 As you know, the commerce world is an extremely competitive environment and your consumers have incredibly high and constantly evolving expectations. So, when thinking about how to revamp your digital commerce technology, you should consider both your future business needs and your consumers' evolving demands. Conducting commerce from the cloud can help you streamline operations and deliver the experiences your consumers need and crave.

About the Author:

 Our featured writer, Wayne Whitcomb, is CTO and VP of Engineering at Demandware.

For more information on Demandware and Digital Commerce Management, visit http://www.demandware.com and http://bit.ly/DW_DCM

The luxury label Tory Burch launched in 2004, the same year that Facebook was introduced and began its domination of the social media industry. It's no surprise, then, that the designer herself and the Tory Burch brand understood the importance of having a presence in the social media giant's network. Tory Burch herself recently spoke at a Women's Wear Daily event for Apparel and Retail CEOs, giving some insight into the social media strategy her team has employed. This is my personal take on what they are doing and why.

In reality it's simple - your customers are using social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+ to connect with and interact with friends and brands online so it only makes sense that you have a presence there too. However, the difficult aspect is figuring out how much, or little, to do. The quantitative return on investment for social media is relatively unknown and there is much debate on the subject, but Tory Burch knew they needed to get involved as a way to connect with its fans on a more personal level.

If you are on Twitter and a fan of the Tory Burch brand, you have likely come across Tory Burch herself Tweeting from the official @ToryBurch account. The site's more than 120,000 followers is no doubt a result of Tory's deep understanding of the importance of connecting with her fans and customers directly. She manages the account on her own and posts all types of tweets, ranging from family matters to airport lines to, of course, social media.

With its large number of fans on Facebook (over 300k!), Tory Burch wanted to leverage the social network by building a fully functioning storefront (although the checkout process happens on the ToryBurch.com site). The first edition of The Tory Burch Facebook Shop, was launched with plans to continuously evolve and improve as they learn more about the expectations and needs of its Facebook shoppers.

The Tory Burch Facebook Shop can be accessed by being a fan of the brand

The site is simple to use and functions very much like its ecommerce storefront. The drop down menus and left-hand navigation are both familiar for an online shopper, but also add in some extra features better suited to Facebook while removing some that may be unnecessary. 

The Tory Burch Facebook Shop allows fans to browse and shop directly from within Facebook

Aside from Facebook, in the future, Tory Burch expects to also leverage Google+ now that the social network has opened itself up to allow for corporate profiles.

Want some more great ideas and examples on how to incorporate social media into your ecommerce strategy? Here are some additional articles and another whitepaper that you might be interested in checking out.

Articles:

• Integrating Facebook into Your eCommerce Strategy
• Turning Social Media into Social Commerce
• Beyond Free Shipping: Facebook Credits for the Social Retailer

Whitepaper:

• Integrating Facebook Into Your eCommerce Strategy

About the Author

Jeff Brandimarte works in product marketing at Demandware and tweets @JBrandimarte

For more information on Demandware and Digital Commerce Management, visit http://www.demandware.com and http://bit.ly/DW_DCM

Disclaimer: By clicking on any of the hyperlinks included in this article you will leave Demandware, Inc.'s website. Demandware assumes no responsibility for information or statements you may encounter on the Internet outside of Demandware's website.

One of the great advantages of digital retail is the flexibility to create and change promotions quickly and easily.  While brick-and-mortar stores and print catalogs need months of planning to execute, with ecommerce compelling promotions can be designed and launched in a matter of minutes.  This flexibility has led to digital retailers engaging in a war of promotions where Free Shipping, percentage-off, and guaranteed lowest prices are the norm. This has created a very desirable environment for consumers.  However this has also created challenges for smaller and niche retailers who cannot necessarily compete and are looking for unique ways to create value and drive customer loyalty. 
 
With the influx of customer interaction happening through social channels with Facebook leading the way, retailers are searching for ways to monetize this activity and many see social media as an opportunity to offer unique consumer incentives. While still an extremely new tool, many forward-thinking retailers have begun experimenting with Facebook Credits – a digital currency that can be redeemed using Facebook gaming applications and other virtual goods. With the right demographic segmentation, retailers who offer Facebook Credits have been able to differentiate themselves from their competitors and realize a strong return on their investment when compared to more traditional online promotions. With Facebook credits costing retailers only a few cents per credit, this is an extremely compelling promotional option that is affordable for almost every retailer.
 
Today Facebook Credit redemption is limited to social games (e.g. Angry Birds, Mafia Wars), virtual goods, and a few downloads of movies directly from the Facebook platform. Even though social games are extremely popular with up to half of all Facebook users reporting that they play games, the current opportunities are just the tip of the iceberg. Many see the natural next steps for Facebook to begin accepting credits as payment for physical goods as Facebook finds ways to monopolize on their ever growing user base.  It has even reached the point where Wal-Mart has started selling Facebook Credit gift cards in their brick-and-mortar stores. 

To learn more about utilizing Facebook credits, download the free whitepaper "The Powers and Possibilities of Facebook Credits" today.

About the Author

Larry Joseloff is an eCommerce Strategist with the Retail Practice team at Demandware. He can be reached at ljoseloff@demandware.com.

Retailers can't truly satisfy the desires of technologically savvy consumers until they recognize how their overall commerce operations support digital interactions across a myriad of ever-expanding channels, devices and applications. They cannot deliver brand experiences and engage with consumers in silos. There must be a central hub that powers all consumer interactions, including the various points of sale (POS).

The shift to a core digital intermediary between enterprise applications and brand engagement, which we refer to as Digital Commerce Management (DCM), will inevitably lead to the death of the traditional, store-centric POS. It will be a slow process due to typical replacement cycles stretching beyond 15 years, but both the hardware and software that power today's POS are already beginning to disappear. 

Don't get me wrong, the in-store cash wrap may not go away entirely, but the POS software applications will no longer be hardcoded to the physical device. Rather, that device – like a tablet, smartphone or computer – will become an entry point to a central platform that manages all digital commerce. Store associates may still require a place to provide service and bag merchandise, but transactions can no longer take place on an island. Hardcoded capabilities -- such as inventory availability, loyalty access, and promotional applicability -- in the traditional POS must be untethered and available via a single commerce instance across geographies, brands, and channels.

IT organizational and procurement practices must change to make this a reality. Today, two different technology buying decisions occur from two different functions in an organization: ecommerce platform and POS hardware and software. The perception is that there are two different sets of requirements, which proliferates two disparate paths to support digital consumers that expect a harmonious engagement across various moments throughout the shopping experience.

We're starting to see blended thinking between the store and ecommerce organizations, but again, it's a slow process. Just as the industry has struggled to help marketers and merchandisers rally around consumer segments instead of product categories, we must now help
technology buyers do the same in this circumstance. It will take some time, but it's clear that it's time to invest in a digital backbone to power in-store technology. In addition to being fiscally savvy, this unified operations and intelligence hub will provide the infrastructure necessary to support dynamic and consistent digital interactions between brands and consumers.

So, who's ahead of the curve? The emerging commerce segment is experiencing the greatest adoption of this virtual point of sale model because they don't have the legacy systems and technological baggage that their more established counterparts do. This transition is definitely a challenge for organizations who have invested heavily in their current ecommerce and POS infrastructure, but the
transformation is inevitable.

One example of an emerging retailer that is doing this particularly well is Bestseller. The team at Bestseller recently established a "Popup Store" for its VERO MODA brand so customers can visit the small store, browse limited clothing samples and shop online with the help of an in-store associate. The customers' purchases are then wrapped and shipped to their door.

This level of interconnected technology and seamless brand engagement is representative of the five commerce imperatives we introduced as part of our DCM strategy. In addition to creating more effective and memorable consumer interactions, this approach also benefits retailers by reducing long-term capital and maintenance investments, enhancing productivity and efficiency for store associates, and driving sales and revenue by placing store associates closer to the customer during the purchase decision.

As time goes on and consumers and technology continue to evolve, retailers must consider how to tackle these challenges holistically, rather than simply addressing singular devices and channels. Much has been said on this topic as it pertains to consumer engagement, but it's important for retailers to remember that this concept doesn't just pertain to interacting with consumers and making a sale. The transaction itself should be equally as connected and seamless.

 About the Author 
Rob Garf is VP of product and solutions marketing for Demandware and can be reached at rgarf (at) demandware (dot) com.

For more information on Demandware and Digital Commerce Management, visit http://www.demandware.com and http://bit.ly/DW_DCM

Disclaimer: By clicking on any of the hyperlinks included in this article you will leave Demandware, Inc.'s website. Demandware assumes no responsibility for information or statements you may encounter on the Internet outside of Demandware's website.

During a recent event in New York City several retailers and brands convened to discuss the "The Digital Directives"– a mandate to commerce technology providers to help retailers and brands exceed expectations of the new and empowered digital consumer.

Jeffrey Rayport, operating partner with Castanea Partners served as the moderator. I had a chance to connect with him after to discuss his thoughts on the event and the retail industry as a whole. His point of view is quite compelling - calling this period a "Retail Renaissance" driven by rapidly changing consumers. Like other participants, he also feels that a common language is necessary to unify functions across retail and consumer brand organizations to address the inherent challenges with digital commerce strategies.

We couldn't agree more, which is why we established Digital Commerce Management (DCM), a strategy to enable retailers to better manage all customer digital interactions with one central platform. It's the future of commerce and what will enable success in this Retail Renaissance.

Below are excerpts from my discussion with Jeffrey. Take a look and let me know what you think. Are we in the middle of a Retail Renaissance? What does that mean for the industry? Please feel free to email me directly at rgarf (at) demandware (dot) com

• What is your key take away from the discussion regarding Digital Directives?

This is a period of unique innovation in digital and multi-channel retail. You might call it a Retail Renaissance. It's been 15 years since Amazon made its first moves to "scale" an e-commerce operation to global proportions. Based on the passage of time, it would be easy to conclude that the sector was mature or maturing. Indeed, two or three years ago, the year-on-year growth numbers for e-commerce in the US market confirmed that impression. But in the last 24 months, something's changed. We have seen an explosion of innovation in online commerce. Some of it is obvious, like the multi-channel challenge.

Yes, it's been around from the outset for any brick-and-mortar retailer with a presence involving catalogs and the Web. But today there are few, if any, retailers who don't consider multi-channel an undeniable reality of business and an imperative to master effectively. Separately, new devices to access the digital world – smart phones, tablets, smart tags, and sensors – have created radically new ways for retailers to sell merchandise whether online or off.

Online, we have seen an explosion of new business models, from private sale sites (GILT Groupe), to time-share purchases (Rent The Runway), to local daily deals (Groupon), to explicit promotions of online deals relevant to physical locations (based on mobility platforms like foursquare).

Put it all together, and the face of retail is changing with enormous rapidity – and tremendous creativity. In that lies not only complexity, but also a mountain of opportunity to do new things in new ways when it comes to selling merchandise.

• What areas of the mandate struck you as interesting or surprising?

From my point of view, the mandate delivers its most powerful message by distinguishing between what technology can deliver and what customers want. The mandate makes the important point that a retailer's goal, in harnessing the power of digital networks and devices, should be driven by the needs of its customers and consumers.
Too often, technology has represented an answer in search of a question. The mandate makes clear that technology enables a multitude of answers, so what's critical is to judiciously define the questions. Once a retailer knows what it wants to achieve, then the technology mandate becomes evident. You could say the same about the retail brand. Again, technology is a means to the end. It doesn't determine what a brand means. It provides a platform for the authentic and compelling expression of a retail brand. If you accept this argument, then the Digital Directives make a series of key points about how retailers and their technology partners should be working together.
The model is militantly customer- and consumer-centric. And the two parties must become partners in creating the best possible consumer outcomes and user experiences

• Where do you see the biggest pain points between retailers and commerce technology provider relationships today?

It's the question of what you in-source versus outsource. This involves sorting out where various strategic capabilities should reside. It demands that a retailer figure out what it needs to be good at – and what a third party can do better. And it means admitting that most retail organizations don't have the size and scale to support a world-class e-commerce operation. If they want to stay on the leading edge, they need a technology partner who lives and breathes retail challenges – as seen through the lens of digital technology.

Of course, the other area of pain is integration of any outside organization with a given retailer's multi-channel strategy. It's often overwhelmingly complex for a single retail organization to integrate its own multi-channel activities and capabilities. Adding an external partner only makes the equation more complex. For that reason, the tech partner must position itself not as a source of added complexity but as a part of the solution that helps to manage the complexity. This, in itself, is painful to do – and painful, or difficult, to get right.

• Why is change needed now? Why are the Digital Directives timely?

As noted above, the retail world is evolving too fast to ignore what is, in effect, a true revolution by sitting out round after round on the sidelines. It's not as if the pace of digital and device innovation, including the rapidly expanding array of retail-relevant apps, is going to slow down. Customers and consumers are not likely to cede any of the control they've acquired by virtue of such tools. So change is needed now for a simple reason; there is no other choice on the menu.

• What's next? What has to happen for change to occur?

We talked a fair amount on the panel in New York City about establishing a "common language" to bring together multiple departments and functions within a retail or consumer brand with the challenges of a digital or multi-channel retail strategy. Add to that the need to include a technology partner, and we're looking at a world where "digital fluency," as opposed to digital capability, has become a requirement for every executive who wants to matter and who wants to win.

About the Author
Rob Garf is VP of product and solutions marketing for Demandware and can be reached at rgarf (at) demandware (dot) com.

For more information on Demandware and Digital Commerce Management, visit http://www.demandware.com and http://bit.ly/DW_DCM

Disclaimer: By clicking on any of the hyperlinks included in this article you will leave Demandware, Inc.'s website. Demandware assumes no responsibility for information or statements you may encounter on the Internet outside of Demandware's website.

Internet Retailer magazine recently unveiled its annual Hot 100 issue where they named the best retail web sites and mobile sites of 2012. We are so excited to share that several of our customers have made the top 100 list for their innovative ecommerce websites and ability to exceed the expectations of the new digital consumer.

Congratulations to our customers who have been named to Internet Retailer's Hot 100! 

Burton.com

Experimentation and testing, at a concept level, is not new. As business pressures increase and the need to improve merchandising and marketing efforts come to the forefront, you need to go beyond assumptions and intuitions in making investment decisions for your ecommerce site, mobile applications and all digital commerce touchpoints. Testing and experimentation, as tools, allows you to examine everything you do digitally by employing simple A/B testing methods.

What is A/B testing?
A/B tests allow merchants to present different experiences to different users, and measure their resulting purchase behavior to identify the "better" experience. In its simplest form, A/B testing is based on two timeframes. For example, you can A/B test four different layouts of a landing page – the element of comparison is the entire page or the entire experience. Multivariate testing allows you to test each sub-element, such as content, layout and imagery, to evaluate the best combination of all of those elements to obtain the most effective landing page.

Below are 10 suggestions to consider when incorporating A/B testing as part of your overall commerce site optimization strategy.

1. Begin with a test plan, including defining a specific hypothesis, goals for the test, and success metrics. Resist the urge to jump straight into running ad-hoc tests.

2. If multiple tests are running on a site, a customer can/should participate in only one A/B test at a time. If you are using the A/B testing functionality available in the Demandware platform, the feature inherently ensures this, so that you don't have to keep this in mind. If you are using an external tool, make sure you clarify this aspect with your vendor.

3.  Test pages that get a good amount of traffic. Without significant traffic (in relation to the overall traffic volume on your site) you may not be able to achieve statistically significant observations within a reasonable amount of time.

4.  Make the duration of the test directly proportional to the number of items tested. The reason behind this is the same as mentioned in the previous point.

5.  Identify your success metric as something that happens most often on your site.

6.  Tests served to a higher percentage of traffic yield results faster. If you are trying to minimize customer impact, try to reduce the scope of the experiment instead of the traffic percentage it is served to.

7.  Test dramatically different concepts for best results. This is especially true for some of the simple tests. Don't test for "Checkout" buttons with different shades of green!

8.  A/B testing is simply a tool to the means, and not an end in itself. The ability to run A/B testing successfully doesn't really mean anything unless you are can apply the results to effect positive change on site revenue and related performance indicators. Don't hesitate to work with your CRM to leverage our collective experience in gaining the most of your efforts in this direction.

9. There is no substitute for talking with customers. Although you can garner some insight into your customers' mindset via these tests, it is no substitute for talking to customer through your contact centers, surveys, social media destination and other channels.

10.  A/B testing is no substitute for usability testing. You should plan to or continue to conduct usability testing as part of your overall site management strategy.

About the author
Vinod Kumar is an eCommerce Strategist at Demandware. Vinod's primary focus areas are business analysis and web analytics. As a strategist, Vinod is responsible for supporting clients and helping them grow by leveraging consultative advice and service offerings to adopt best practices.

For more information on Demandware and Digital Commerce Management, visit http://www.demandware.com and http://bit.ly/DW_DCM

For millions of people, Facebook is the irreplaceable, indispensable, and irresistible daily destination where they can catch up with friends, play online games, share photos, and more. It's the daily "must visit" that has brought Facebook to the very top of the world's Web properties with a reported 46.9¹ percent reach among all Web users.

According to recent statistics¹, Facebook has more than 800 million active users, half of whom log on every day, and generates more daily traffic than Google. And those logins aren't quick, either. Users spend 700 billion minutes on Facebook each month, generating 1 trillion page views and creating an average of 90 new pieces of content.²

Not surprisingly, the size of the audience and the intensity of its engagement make Facebook a central part of any retailer's customer retention and acquisition strategy. According to Scott Galloway of L2 Think Tank, 40 percent of Facebook users use the site to follow a brand and 15 percent of them plan on purchasing that brand within 60 days.³ "Facebook," he says, "is a transformative platform that needs to be incorporated into every retailer's marketing strategy. Over time, digital marketing channels will significantly reduce offline ad spends."

The fact is, interacting with Facebook has become a core tenet of the contem­porary online retail experience. So, how can a retailer tap into this vast potential to reach new buyers, strengthen existing relationships, and build brand loyalty?

The following are some basic and proven best practices to show how companies can organize and prioritize their efforts to integrate and leverage the enormous power that the Facebook platform has to offer. You can also download the complete whitepaper - "Integrating Facebook into your eCommerce Strategy."

 1.)    Start with a Facebook Page –

A Facebook Page is the place where your consumers identify and support your participation in Facebook. Be sure to make your page interactive and give your fans a chance to "pile on" by sharing their own stories, experiences, perspectives and brand interactions.

 
 
    Burton Snowboards's Facebook page provides a forum for brand enthusiasts to connect and share

 2.)    Give Consumers a Voice: Product Like

Once you have established your Facebook beachhead, you need to connect the dots for your consumer. On your ecommerce site, be sure to add Facebook's simple LIKE button to align and unify your brand voice with your consumer's willingly expressed preferences. When the visitor to your site clicks on the LIKE button, he voluntarily broadcasts his preference for your brand on his own Facebook page. Since referrals from friends and relatives are the most credible form of marketing at your disposal, the LIKE button can be a powerful addition to your ecommerce strategy.

3.)    Beyond the LIKE: Product Share

In the larger scheme of things: the LIKE is a fairly passive form of brand engagement – a quick click and it's done. But you can strengthen that relationship with your Facebook user community by enabling the consumer to SHARE your product with her Facebook friends. With SHARE, you ease the data-entry process by auto-populating the user's post to her own Facebook wall. More powerfully, the user can send the "product SHARE" to a Facebook friend as a message.

 Lucy uses a "Share on Facebook" button, letting the buyer/prospect spread the word quickly and conveniently

4.)    Offer Exclusive Opportunities

Now that your Facebook presence is established and you've built an active com­munity in all directions (FRIENDS, LIKE, SHARE) – and you've spent some time to analyze the propensity of your community to consume your unique content – it's time to start testing the best ways to use Facebook to directly generate meaningful and measurable demand. Many businesses have found several brand-appropriate ways to use Facebook to promote special "insider" offers, short-term deals, specials, and otherwise "secret" or "early" access to marketing promotions and programs that can double the results of traditional marketing programs.

There are two key principles to bear in mind. First, establish a repeatable, recognizable cadence to your offers. For instance, send them at the same time of day with a very consistent look-and-feel. Consider "mini-branding" them with a special title to make them easy to identify. Second, the Facebook opportunities and promotions should not become central to your marketing or revenue plans. They should be a welcome additive – not a revenue source on which you become dependent.

 5.)    Streamline the login and pre-capture registration

It's the task that users have grown to loathe: registering for each ecommerce site where they make purchases. Re-entering contact, shipping, and payment information can present hurdles that prevent purchases and quell buyer enthusi­asm. Historically, the rate of registered vs. non-registered activity has been held back by the burden of registration (creating more passwords and requiring more form data). 

However, Facebook presents an intriguing opportunity to take advantage of single-sign-on eCommerce. By capitalizing on Facebook's login – so-called "so­cial sign-on" – the ecommerce site can (securely and with permission) transpar­ently tap into the Facebook user's contact, shipping, payment, and preferences data to deliver a streamlined, personalized buying experience, increasing buyer satisfaction and improving the likelihood of referrals and repeat visits/purchases. In essence, the user is registered in advance for your site simply by logging into Facebook. 

Be sure to format your user interface through the use of layers or alterative tabs.

 6.)   Shopping Directly in Facebook 

After using Facebook as a strategic platform for more effective marketing and successfully creating an active community of loyal buyers and
brand enthusiasts, many businesses are seeking to bring the shopping experience directly to the Facebook platform. While these initiatives are still in the early stages and compli­cated by the need to address data security and privacy issues, many brands are using the social strength of Friends to remove barriers that might prevent impul­sive purchases based on recommendations or referrals from Facebook Friends. 

The Facebook community is particularly sensitive, so be sure to preserve security and privacy at every opportunity. You can't afford to compromise on these issues or you will permanently lose the trust of Facebook buyers. Clearly communicate what you are doing: Is it a limited assortment? Is the offer time-sensitive? Clarity and transparency are paramount in building and maintaining buyer relationships.

Stay engaged with the consumers who are purchasing directly from Facebook. Reward them for their early adopter status and ongoing loyalty. This will increase their sense of prestige and their influence with their Friends. Use that to your advantage and recognize them as your business evangelists.

 Tory Burch now offers live shopping transactions directly from within Facebook

As a platform for delivering unique, engaging, and customized shopping experiences, Facebook represents an unprecedented opportunity for retailers. This continuum of best practices can jumpstart the retailer's Facebook strategy and accelerate the results that can be achieved.

 More Information

For more about how to integrate Facebook into your ecommerce strategy, download the complete whitepaper - "Integrating Facebook into your eCommerce Strategy" today.

 About the Author:

Harvey Bierman leads Demandware's North America Retail Practice and oversees its Solution Strategy Group. In this role, Harvey personally engages with Demandware customers as a strategic advisor concerning their global growth and organizational design strategies.

Sources: 

1 http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

2 http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/entertainment/128407633.html

3 http://l2thinktank.com/research/

Disclaimer: By clicking on any of the hyperlinks included in this article you will leave Demandware, Inc.'s website. Demandware assumes no responsibility for information or statements you may encounter on the Internet outside of Demandware's website.

*This article also recently appeared as a guest post on the Invodo blog

Shopping is an interactive sport. While smartphone wielding consumers are the main players of the sport, retailers are the ones who set the field of engagement, both online and in the physical world. A variety of methods, tools and technologies exist for retailers to engage consumers, but few are as mature and easy to utilize as 2D codes.

The Rise of 2D Codes

2D codes are two dimensional (hence the name "2D") images encoded with information. The information can be decoded with a camera-driven scanning application, which will perform a variety of functions including displaying texts, linking to a specific URL, or linking to video content. 2D codes are used for a variety of industrial uses, but 3 key types are used for consumer-facing uses:  Quick Response Codes (QR Codes), Microsoft Tags (MS Tags, aka High Capacity Color Barcode) and barcodes. There are different reasons why retailers would use one type over another.

QR Codes and MS Tags in particular have risen in adoption among consumers, especially those that use smartphones. Smartphones provide consumers with the hardware (including the camera) and a platform for the software applications (i.e. ScanLife, ShopSavvy, MS Tag and others), making 2D codes easily accessible and practical for shopping like never before.

Uses of 2D Codes

2D codes are applicable throughout each stage of brand engagement with the consumer, which make them a great tool for retailers to create a more interactive shopping experience and connect the online and physical worlds. If applied properly, the benefits retailers can reap include greater brand recognition, greater online and in-store sales, an increase in average order value, greater customer satisfaction and repeat purchases, as well as reduced return rates and support costs. To realize these benefits, retailers should focus the application of 2D codes around four main uses, namely to:

1. Create brand awareness with consumers
2D codes are a great tool for marketers to capture the attention of shoppers—particularly those on the go with mobile devices and those inundated with other information sources– to create market awareness and craft brand perception. Barney's New York used QR codes as part of a "Back Stage Campaign" in early 2011 where they displayed ads in the New York Times and online that contained QR codes which linked to online, content-rich "backstage" stories of the products. This energized the approach to traditional advertising and helped drive brand awareness among consumers who may have otherwise not been reached.

2. Share information to educate consumers
2D codes can guide potential consumers towards purchase by providing them information about products, services, events, and more. Columbia Sportswear produces world-class outdoor apparel for consumers who are interested in learning about how the product was produced, what materials were used to produce it, what conditions the products are meant to be used in and what additional features the product contains that may not be readily apparent. They use QR codes as part of in-store signage and hangtags on products in company stores, as well as other retailers who distribute Columbia gear, to provide consumers with more information about products through video and other content while standing in the store aisle.

Electronic Arts, a leading producer of video games, provides its distributors with in-store digital signage that contain QR codes for content samples of their products. For their game Dragon Age II, shoppers could scan the QR code and get a video demo of the game.

3. Drive consumers to purchase
2D codes give retailers a unique opportunity to convert sales, especially when they help solve specific problems consumers face, such as cutting down on checkout time or offering immediate rewards. In addition to using QR codes to share information about how their coffee beans were produced, Ethical Beans Roastery and Ethical Bean Xpress Café give consumers the ability to scan QR codes on their products, allowing shoppers to skip waiting in lines and pick up the orders at checkout. Axis Salon, a trendy hair salon in Washington DC, uses QR codes in its storefront that link to videos featuring beauty icons and coupons for discount services—all helping to drive consumers to purchase.

4. Foster customer loyalty post-purchase
After the sale, 2D codes can drive foster customer satisfaction by providing extra services, support and personalized offers. Nike uses QR codes in its stores to allow consumers to "Like" a product on Facebook, enabling consumers to share their affinity for a brand through recommendations on Facebook. A logical extension to this concept would be to provide rewards (loyalty points, mobile coupons, immediate discounts, etc.) for shoppers who provide such feedback. Ikea entertained the idea of using QR codes to provide video instructions on how to assemble products, such as furniture, making the post-purchase process a more enjoyable one.

Similarly, QR codes can serve as an easy way to locate product manuals online or warranty information, which could be a real benefit to consumers who often do not keep such information that come with the products, and need to locate them immediately when something goes wrong. This would help cut down on support costs for retailers, in addition to fostering customer loyalty post-purchase.

The Future of 2D Codes
While 2D codes have reached a level of maturity where they are an effective tool for retailers today, they still have a number of challenges to overcome– standardization of code technology (open QR codes v proprietary MS Tags), reader availability, and deeper level consumer awareness beyond where it's at today– optimally reaching the same level of consumer awareness that UPC barcodes enjoy today. They also face long-term obsolescence from Near Field Communication (NFC), but that is a ways off in the future given NFC nascent state at the present. Bottom line is that 2D codes do not require a lot of time or money to implement and can have large potential returns, so retailers should experiment with them while the cost of learning is low.

To learn more about how retailers can integrate 2D codes into their online storefronts and help drive innovative and exciting ways to engage consumers, download our best practices guide, "Quick-Response Codes in a Multi-Channel World"

Learn how retailers can integrate 2D codes into Demandware-powered storefronts, and help drive innovative and exciting ways to engage consumers.

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To learn more about Demandware and Demandware Commerce, visit - http://www.demandware.com

Like this article? Below are some others you might like to check out. 

Preparing for the New World of Multichannel Commerce

5 Technologies That Will Change How Consumers Shop

Social and Mobile Commerce Leading the Way for eCommerce Growth

Barcode and QR Code Scanning on the Mobile Web

Disclaimer: By clicking on any of the hyperlinks included in this article you will leave Demandware, Inc.'s website. Demandware assumes no responsibility for information or statements you may encounter on the Internet outside of Demandware's website.

Gary Lombardo leads Commerce Solutions marketing at Demandware. As part of his role, he helps retailers navigate the world of multichannel, mobile and social commerce. Gary tweets @garylombardo and can be reached via email at glombardo at demandware dot com.

For retailers in today's competitive landscape, presenting accurate, detailed, and synchronized product information to consumers is a key way to capture and retain them. It's no secret that consumers are more likely to trust the information they find via the web. In fact, 69 percent of consumers trust web data – including product information and reviews – more than information attained from a sales associate, according to a recent commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting. A mere 16 percent believe that store associates are the best resource for product information.

Retailers that rely on existing legacy and siloed systems struggle to present detailed and consistent product information to consumers across channels, applications, and devices. And much of the management and movement of information is via brute force, resulting in suboptimal consumer experiences and fickle consumer loyalty.

In an ideal world, product content is automatically syndicated from a single commerce platform to the web, mobile, call center, and even in-store interactive devices. In fact, Peter Sachse, Chief Marketing Officer for Macy's, talks about the need to "bring the online to offline", and the $400M renovation of their Herald Square flagship location is largely focused on digitizing the in-store experience and leveraging their digital platform to deliver interactive technology, content, and capabilities.  

The benefit: effectively and efficiently syndicate and synchronize digital content that's available anytime, anywhere. The consumer receives a branded, holistic consumer experience, and merchants save time and effort by easily unleashing the power of digital assets beyond the web channel.

The recent announcement of JC Penney's partnership with Esquire to operate an online men's store demonstrates the importance of utilizing the digital product information from jcp.com via other media. This becomes increasingly more important as content, community, and commerce continue to converge. With Ron Johnson at the helm, expect to see accelerated innovation from one of the oldest retailers in the America.

Another great example is Columbia Sportswear, which uses a central cloud commerce platform to manage four distinct brands – Columbia Sportswear, Sorel, Mountain Hardwear, and Montrail – with more than a dozen international sites as well. Columbia understands the importance of consistent and strong product content across channels, devices, brands and geographies including product descriptions, product specifications, ratings and review, and video demonstrations. As of this year, this translates to in-store experiences via QR codes on merchandise tags, allowing consumers to use their smartphone and scan for product information served by the commerce platform.

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About the Authors:

Rob Garf is VP of product and solutions marketing for Demandware and can be reached at rgarf (at) demandware (dot) com.

Adam Forrest manages product marketing for Demandware and can be reached at aforrest (at) demandware (dot) com and he tweets at @adammwoods

 Liked this article? Below are a few others you might find interesting:

Open APIs Enable Retailers to Establish "The Web as Platform"

The Future of Commerce is Digital Commerce Management (DCM)

Where's My Stuff? – Seamlessly Manage Orders Through a Single Commerce Platform

Remember when Tim O'Reilly introduced Web 2.0 more than seven years ago? The most powerful point was "The Web as Platform." While provocative and true at the time, it was not entirely possible. Now, the advent and maturity of Open APIs allow retailers to expose digital content, processes, and capabilities to an expanding number of consumer interactions more easily and more efficiently than ever before.

APIs – and specifically Open APIs – are the key to making "The Web as Platform" reality, and they're an essential component of Digital Commerce Management (DCM). They push commerce beyond just the web browser, deliver harmonious shopping experiences, facilitate speedy innovation and integration, and extend key customer, product and/or promotional data to new touch points. More importantly, Open APIs will help retailers brace for the unknown, and ensure they're prepared to fulfill consumers' future shopping expectations.

When we announced the introduction of our Open Commerce APIs in September, our goal was to provide cross-channel integration to syndicate and synchronize critical commerce information such as promotion, price, order, customer record, content and images wherever consumers and store associates interact with web-enabled devices. These capabilities closely align with the bigger picture, DCM, as it's evident that Open APIs are essential to at least two of the five technology imperatives: 

• Deliver Experiences: O'Reilly asserts in his Manifesto, "Web 2.0 doesn't have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core. You can visualize Web 2.0 as a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles, at a varying distance from that core." Open APIs can be used for seamless and far-reaching shopping experiences beyond the "gravitational core." This includes completion of transactions on Facebook, shoppable blogs through open plug-ins, mobile and tablet applications natively through community developed SDKs, and even recommendation widgets inside point of sale applications
• Extend Integrations: Open APIs integrate and utilize key customer, product and/or promotional data in physical locations through interactive display windows, handhelds, third-party applications, kiosks, and mashups

Best Buy's BBYOpen is a great example of how brands and retailers are using Open APIs to build and deploy cross-platform applications. BBYOpen gives access to full product information, including pricing, availability, specifications, ratings and reviews, descriptions, and images for nearly one million current and historical products. By releasing the data via these APIs, Best Buy offers developers and businesses the ability to create and innovate in new ways.

The DCM strategy underscore's our belief that technology should solve – not create - business problems. Technology and consumer behaviors are evolving so rapidly that there is no way to anticipate what's next. What you can do, however, is prepare for that change by implementing a technological infrastructure with Open APIs that will allow you to react quickly to new customer demands and integrate the latest touch points into your brand engagement strategy.

Making Open APIs part of that strategy will help you leverage internal and external developers from a large community so that you can quickly and confidently deploy the next great consumer experience, without the hassle of managing yet another integration. This will not only save you time and money, but it will help to ensure that you're always one step ahead of the competition -- and your consumers.

Use the web as a platform. Future-proof your platform with Open APIs.

 For more information about API's check out these other resources:

 Turn Your Online Store Into a Digital POS with the Help of Open Commerce APIs

 Commerce Beyond the Platform: Demandware Releases New Open Commerce APIs

 Video: Get on the Open Commerce Road

Visit www.demandware.com for more information about Demandware and Demandware Commerce

 Disclaimer: By clicking on any of the hyperlinks included in this article you will leave Demandware, Inc.'s website. Demandware assumes no responsibility for information or statements you may encounter on the Internet outside of Demandware's website.

  - - Article by Rob Garf, Adam Forrest and Ulrike Mueller

By Gary Lombardo

As part of my job, you can typically find me talking or writing about the importance of building out an integrated multichannel commerce strategy. As I have said before, multichannel has evolved beyond a series of "channels" and into a variety of digital touch points that consumers interact with, including traditional ecommerce sites, smartphones, tablets, mobile point of sale, social networks and others. Consumers are making decisions non-linearly, interacting with a variety of these digital touch points along the way. As a result, mobile is playing a leading role in this new age of multichannel commerce. The place to start for any retailer is with a mobile optimized website for smartphones.  Additional mobile capabilities, such as mobile native apps, iPad mobile web-optimized sites and native apps and retailer-provided in-store mobile applications can evolve over time leveraging the mobile optimized website for smartphones as a foundation.

Why are mobile websites important to retailers?

 Mobile websites are important to retailers for four main reasons: 

1) Customer's expect it. There's a shift from online shopping from desktop to mobile devices, and shoppers will expect a mobile-optimized experience when they visit a retailer's website on their mobile device.  If they don't get it, they'll likely abandon the site and/or form a negative opinion of the brand, often going to a competitor's site

2) It's a revenue opportunity- Mobile opens a new revenue channel that can drive 2-6% of online revenue today (higher for some retailers), with huge upside growth over the next 5 years

3) Greater brand engagement and customer satisfaction. Mobile websites aren't just about the online world, but help connect online to offline/brick and mortar.  For instance, if shoppers can't find a product in-store, they'll often access the retailer's website to find the product, so having an optimized experience could capture that sale.  Mobile websites also provide opportunities for retailers to engage mobile consumers directly with mobile only offers and promotions, and tie-backs to in-store purchases. 

4) Competition. According to Forrester, about 74% of retailers today have already invested or are thinking about investing in a mobile website. More than likely that number includes your competition. 

What are the ingredients that make up a great mobile website?

I was recently asked this question during a discussion with Erin Harris of Integrated Solutions for Retailers for a cover story she wrote about Demandware client, Frederick's of Hollywood and its mobile strategy. You can check out the complete article here. During the discussion I shared the top three ingredients that go into a successful mobile strategy which I have also outlined below.

1.) Core mobile website functionality that all shoppers expect. Retailers need to tailor the functionality and user experience on mobile devices to the mobile user. They shouldn't take all the same functionality that exists on their main retail site and port it to mobile (or just shrink their site down). Mobile shoppers expect certain core functionality like prominent search, easy checkout, store locator, easy navigation & browse, etc.  Navigation should also be easy and intuitive.  Mobile users are in a hurry, so making sure they can find the information they are looking for within one or two clicks is essential.

2.) Speed and performance. Since mobile users are in a hurry, they expect a site that will load quickly and not have a lot of latency.  Some of this is outside of the retailer's control (i.e. carrier network), but others factors are in the retailer's control.  For instance, the approach they take to implementing a mobile site can make a big difference.  An approach such as creating a proxy site or screen scraping can slow down page load times, while building a site that is directly integrated with the ecommerce platform can provide better performance.

3.) Integrate your site with other digital channels, but be able to be manage separately.  A mobile website should be integrated with all other digital channels (in-store, native apps, ecommerce site, etc.) to provide a consistent user experience, but also for simple management by retailers.  The mobile  website should also be able to be managed distinctly to engage the mobile user (i.e. targeted content or promotions), who often have different needs than those visiting other digital channels.

 Can't get enough about mobile commerce?  Here are some other articles you will want to check out:

Preparing for the New World of Multichannel Commerce

5 Technologies That Will Change How Consumers Shop

So You've Got a Mobile Commerce Site, Now What?

For more information about Demandware and the Demandware Commerce platform visit: http://www.demandware.com

For additional commerce best practices, visit the Demandware Resource Center

Disclaimer: By clicking on any of the hyperlinks included in this article you will leave Demandware, Inc.'s website. Demandware assumes no responsibility for information or statements you may encounter on the Internet outside of Demandware's website.

Gary Lombardo manages mobile, multichannel and social commerce product marketing for Demandware.  He tweets @garylombardo

By Rob Garf

 "The only constant is change" - Heraclitus, Greek philosopher (c.535 BC - 475 BC)  

Over the past 10 years, during the world's headlong rush into the next great era of the Web, retailing has been reinvented and then reinvented again. And over that time of incredible change, which brought us the mass adoption of broadband and the births of the mobile web and social networks, nearly everyone involved in the business of delivering web commerce to the consumer has embraced two facts of the new, new world. One, as fast as things are moving now, they are still accelerating with no slowdown in sight. And two, the old methods of building and delivering technology-enabled consumers experience, just ain't gonna cut it anymore. 

Today we announced Digital Commerce Management (DCM), a framework that serves as both our product vision and a roadmap that will enable retailers to better manage all of the digital interactions with their customers in a richly-branded way. It's our name for the future of commerce:

• For the way that merchants want to distinguish the brand and delight their consumers at every turn…
• For the way that commerce technologies should serve and enable retailers from now on...
• For the way that ecosystems of innovators should collaborate and interoperate…
• For the vision that has guided us and will continue to guide us in development of our products and solutions... 

This new industry term comes as a result of the understanding we have gained through our service of leading retailers and our belief that a new approach to commerce technology is necessary to deliver on consumers' escalating digital demands. DCM is our vision – and a proposed strategy for the industry – to quell retailers' frustrations and answer the challenge they presented to commerce technology vendors through "The Digital Directives: a Manifesto to Commerce Technology Providers." 

As we all well know, Smart Consumers, shoppers who are empowered by the web in all of its wondrous forms, are going through a remarkable transformation in how they engage with brands and retailers. This, in turn, means retailers must evolve just as quickly, if not faster, to provide consumers with an array of brand experiences that will differentiate and sustain profitable retailing. Retailers must reinvent themselves and their technologies to deliver a distinctive harmony of experiences across any touch point, in any sequence, throughout any moment, and beyond their commerce platform to create a "chose your own adventure" brand experience. 

DCM is a fundamentally new and versatile technology strategy that effectively and consistently fulfills these brand expectations. It enables organizations to create value by focusing on business strategies and outcomes that are unconstrained by expensive and slow-moving legacy applications and point-to-point integrations. 

So, What Does DCM Look Like? 

In short, however, DCM is comprised of five, interconnected technology imperatives: 

1. Deliver Experiences: Simplify the shopping process and create open communications with consumers on their terms through any channel, application or device
2. Manage Commerce: Provide centralized control and seamless workflow across merchandising, marketing, sales, and service applications
3. Operationalize Data and Intelligence: Dynamically synchronize customer, product, inventory and order data for timely decisions and relevant consumer interactions
4. Extend Integration: Quickly and securely interface internal data and applications with external environments to extend commerce capabilities to any number of emerging consumer touch points
5. Scale Infrastructure: Harness an elastic technology platform for scalable and reliable service 

Why Should Retailers and Technology Vendors Care? 

We all need to adapt to the evolving commerce environment to ensure we're meeting consumers at every new, technological turn. Moreover, we need to work together to accomplish this goal. No one brand or commerce vendor can do this alone. DCM puts an end to the discussion of the problem and provides the first strategic solution for achieving these goals. 

DCM will provide the following benefits: 

• Faster responses to new consumer trends like in-store clienteling with iPads, and use of mobile and social commerce
• Better control over the customer experience, delivering uniformity in marketing, merchandising, sales and service
• Increased focus on innovations that directly relate to the brand and the consumer experience, thereby creating lasting, unique and profitable consumer relationships
• Reduced operational expenses with a framework that easily allows diverse technologies to integrate and co-exist in one digital ecosystem
• Maximum value of digital investments by developing scalable, extensible ecommerce networks/touch points that can be managed in concert and extend well beyond the ecommerce platform

The Demandware Vision 

We created DCM as our product vision and we've shared it with the industry because we believe it's the right answer for the challenges that are facing retailers and technology vendors today.

Today's press release about DCM outlines our recent product introductions that demonstrate how we've invested in and aligned our products with the DCM strategy. These new enhancements to our portfolio, our role as a SaaS pioneer, our extensive partner ecosystem, and our track record for delivering and supporting innovation, uniquely position us to introduce DCM to the industry.

We welcome your thoughts about DCM and we invite you to embark on this journey with us as you think about how you will be delivering new and integrated commerce technologies to consumers. Please feel free to write to me at rgarf (at) demandware (dot) com.

If you're interested in learning more about DCM, you can read the full whitepaper, "Digital Commerce Management Enables Highly-Branded Digital Engagement."

You can also watch me in this video below introducing DCM during a recent panel discussion in New York City where retailers, brands and technology providers gathered to discuss and debate the implications of "The Digital Directives."

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Disclaimer: By clicking on any of the hyperlinks included in this article you will leave Demandware, Inc.'s website. Demandware assumes no responsibility for information or statements you may encounter on the Internet outside of Demandware's website.

Rob Garf is VP of product and solutions marketing for Demandware and can be reached at rgarf (at) demandware (dot) com.

For more information on Demandware and Digital Commerce Management, visit http://www.demandware.com and http://bit.ly/DW_DCM

By Rob Garf and Adam Forrest

The order lifecycle represents an integral part of the overall consumer brand experience, and it significantly impacts consumer loyalty. Unfortunately, because of limiting and disparate legacy systems, many retailers are unable to deliver harmonious order experiences to consumers across their growing number of channels, devices and touch points. They're also forced to "dumb down" merchandising and promotions to the lowest common denominator to accommodate loosely-coupled and hard-coded business logic.

This thwarts retailers' ability to grow revenue, differentiate their brands, and deliver the kinds of experiences that today's Smart Consumers demand.

That is why order management is a key priority for our product development team. By providing order access and manipulation directly within the commerce platform, our capabilities will complement existing order management applications that primarily focus on order orchestration and execution.

By incorporating order management capabilities into a central commerce platform, retailers can effectively fuse sell-side commerce (merchandising, marketing, customer service, etc.) with service-side commerce (returns, order status queries, etc.). This will result in reduced customer service costs and enhanced shopping experience:

• Deliver rich promotion and merchandising for each unique order
• Provide seamless customer experience across channels and devices
• Establish comprehensive digital self-service features

Amazon is a great example of a major retailer that has implemented an integrated order management system and reaped the benefits. Think about your own experiences with Amazon. They provide tremendous order access, visibility, flexibility, and manipulation during all stages of the order lifecycle. This experience sets high expectations for  today's demanding Smart Consumers. Every retailer should strive for that level of service, execution and intelligence during the entire order process.

In fact, many of the biggest retailers with the largest IT spends are taking this on today. Some are succeeding (at huge costs), while others are not. At Demandware, we believe that every retailer should have these capabilities -- delivered by one platform -- without an enormous financial burden and a reliance on in-house IT teams. 

Our Digital Commerce Management (DCM) strategy has five interconnected technology imperatives: Deliver Experiences, Manage Commerce, Operationalize Data and Intelligence, Extend Integration and Scale Infrastructure. Order management empowers retailers to:

• Manage Commerce: Centralizing the control of order, payment, delivery, return, and exchange or credit of goods processes
• Operationalize Data and Intelligence: Tapping into data such as order status and product availability to inform consumers about in-store availability and power personalized offers

Order management is a critical component of DCM. We are developing the following ten base order management capabilities, which connect traditional back-office order execution with front-office order interaction, will ensure that the order is persistent at each point of interaction:

• Order lifecycle management to create and maintain customer accounts, order entry, order modification, inventory allocation, return and appeasement credits, customer email notifications
• Automatic upgrades to reduce the need to upgrade multiple systems to get the latest merchandising rules and promotions to work
• Call center and customer service support to facilitate order entry, maintenance, and access to customer and order history
• Order queue management for customer service workflows
• Pre-built integrations to complementary, third-party solutions for payment, tax and fraud
• Modification of payment details for failed payment activity
• Initiation of funds capture and return
• Hold-back and release of ordered items based on inventory availability
• Creation and management of shipping orders for WMS interaction
• Extraction of invoice transaction data for import into client's financial systems

For more information about Demandware and Digital Commerce Management , visit http://www.demandware.com and http://bit.ly/DW_DCM

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Rob Garf is VP of product and solutions marketing for Demandware and can be reached at rgarf (at) demandware (dot) com.

Adam Forrest manages product marketing for Demandware and can be reached at aforrest (at) demandware (dot) com and he tweets at @adammwoods

Site Pinning

The web browser has gone through multiple evolutions over the years—from a simple tool for accessing the web to a platform with everything from plug-ins to enhance what can be done on websites to applications that can be installed on the browser from a webstore.  Recently, the web browser has taken the next step in its evolution by enabling websites to behave like native applications on the web-enabled devices, such as desktops and laptops.

The current version of Internet Explorer, version 9, provides the ability for retailers to take their website outside of the browser and "pin" it or in other words, put the website right where the majority of users launch their favorite native applications—on the task bar.

An example of a retailer's website pinned on a shopper's desktop taskbar with IE9 Site Pinning

Site pinning provides a number of benefits including the ability to:

• Increase the likelihood shoppers will transact.   With the website part of the most commonly used set of applications on the task bar, by enabling site pinning, we believe shoppers are more likely to visit a retailer's pinned site and transact, especially if notifications are tied to offers, new products and other compelling brand events, thereby capturing the shopper's attention and providing them a reason to visit.
• Re-enforce loyalty with shoppers.  If shoppers grant permission to a brand to be pinned and part of their every day online experience, we believe retailers have a unique opportunity to re-enforce loyalty with shoppers.

IE9 Site Pinning Prototype from Demandware

As part of Demandware Labs, we recently released the IE9 Site Pinning prototype that allows Demandware customers to enable shoppers to pin the Demandware customer's website in Internet Explorer 9.   The Demandware IE9 Pinning prototype works with Internet Explorer version 9, is easy to install and set up, and can be customized by Demandware customers to meet their needs. Some of the key features of IE9 Site Pinning from Demandware include:

• Run a website as a native application-  Allows your ecommerce website to resemble other native applications, from access on the task bar to native application functionality.

• Pre-built banner- Provides a pre-built, customizable banner to help shoppers discover how to pin your ecommerce site. 

• High visibility branded favicon- Put your brand's icon on the Windows taskbar and browser control bar, keeping your site top of mind for the consumer.  Consumers will also have one click access to your website, bringing them back again and again. 

• Customize browser button colors-  Take your site a bit further towards a native application by customizing the color of the browser buttons.

• Notifications- Catch the attention of your consumers when they are not actively browsing your site by pulling them in with timely & visible notifications for when new content is available, such as new products, promotions or to remind them that items are in the cart. 

• Thumbnail preview controls-  Allow shoppers to control your site from outside the browser, making it easy to directly navigate to product promotion pages, the shopper's cart, or other pages on your site.

• Quick action Jump Lists- Let consumers quickly access content beyond your home page.  A simple right click on the task bar icon accesses two types of jump lists: static and dynamic.  Static jump lists let you promote the most common places your consumers to go.  Examples could include your Facebook fan page, the website for other related brands, or other sites.  Dynamic jump lists let you pull your users to specific content pages on your website such as sub-category pages, personalized deals, new product pages, or trending topics.

Thumbnail preview controls and quick action jump lists in IE9 Site Pinning

Retailers can also easily extend and customize the IE9 Site Pinning protoype  to meet their particular needs. Watch the demo below to learn more.

Demandware customers can download the IE9 Site Pinning prototype and begin using it today. 

By Christine Major

In a recent post by David Boyle about the benefits of a cloud-based multi-tenant ecommerce environment, he focused on the outage Target experienced after its Missoni clothing line was released. If you aren't aware of the situation, Target moved its ecommerce site from a cloud-based solution and switched to an on-premise platform.  Fans of the Italian designer flocked to the site, the site couldn't handle the traffic because there wasn't enough bandwidth to support the surge of demand and the site went down…for about four hours. Customers were angry they couldn't access the site and some even lost orders they placed due to the bandwidth issues.

To make matters worse, only about a month after the first outage, the Target site went down again, this time for six hours and with that outage resigned its head of online retailing, Steve Eastman. 

 These outages will go down in history, replacing even the Victoria's Secret online fashion show outage, as a lesson in the importance of capacity planning and the benefits of cloud computing. 

Could the outage have been avoided if Target stayed in the cloud?

As David Boyle pointed out in his article, with a cloud infrastructure, you can quickly provision more resources to solve short term capacity demands much faster than you can with stand-alone systems. So the answer is, most probably yes. Even though they likely knew in advance that its Missoni promotion would generate a traffic spike, they couldn't forecast just how large that demand would be. The elasticity of a cloud system would have allowed them to see the bandwidth problems as they were occurring and react quickly by adding more bandwidth on the fly to avoid any outages and slowdowns.

This is exactly what happened to The Company Store after they were featured on The Today Show for its "Jill's Steals and Deals" flash sale segment.

Preparing for the Big Day

The Company Store was contacted by The Today Show with the amazing opportunity to have its brand, which strives to be the #1 source of everyday comfort and style, and also one of its exclusively designed products featured on the very popular segment. Seeing this as more of an opportunity for brand awareness and customer acquisition than an opportunity to drive sales, The Company Store wanted to make sure they made a great first impression.

Known for driving heavy traffic to the sites they feature, The Today Show gives fair warning to all visitors that the sites tend to slowdown due to high volumes of traffic. Not having much time to prepare, they reached out to its Demandware support contact to let them know of the impending surge in traffic. Because Demandware is a SaaS-model, they could easily increase the level of bandwidth to allow for the anticipated surge.

To further prepare for the offer, within a week of the Today Show segment, The Company Store was able to leverage the flexibility and ease-of-use of the Demandware Commerce platform to add in special content assets to the product page for the featured product. They duplicated the product page and created a link to a hidden page with the Jills Steals and Deals banner so it was clear to the customer that the page they were visiting correlated with the offer they saw on the Today show. For all other visitors to that product page, the content asset was not visible.

Jill's Steals and Deals is Released to the Wild

Immediately after Jill revealed her deals at approximately 9:30am ET, The Company Store began to see the traffic start to come in. Because they worked with Demandware in advance, they knew that they had the bandwidth they needed to handle the surge. They were also confident that because of the elasticity of the Demandware platform, any slowdowns could be addressed with the addition of more bandwidth if traffic exceeds original expectations.

And it did just that.

 For The Company Store, its average total number of user visits is typically about 36,000-45,000 per day. As a result of the flash sale, they received approximate 95,000 visitors with the majority hitting just after the deal was revealed on the East Coast and then again on the West Coast and trickling off throughout the day. This traffic resulted in about 5,000 internet orders for this day alone. During a "normal" week The Company Store usually takes in about 8,000-9,000 internet orders. Not only that, 85 percent of the customers who purchased the sheet set were new customers and 250 of those 5,000 orders also purchased other items from the retailer.

Throughout the day, Demandware monitored the site traffic while The Company Store paid close attention to its customers and their feedback as a way to determine how the site was performing. While average order time increased slightly, customers were willing to wait to get the deal. Still, the retailer didn't want them to have to wait too long for their orders to go through because you cannot get another opportunity for a first impression.

Throughout the day as the site continued to receive large amounts of traffic, the site was running slower than they could deal with. With the click of a switch, Demandware was able to quickly increase bandwidth to the site so that it was running smoothly once again.

According to Andrea Daney, ecommerce project manager for The Company Store, "with our old home-grown platform there is no doubt that this flash sale would have brought our site down. It happened once before on our old platform when a promotion code we were offering went viral. Because of the flexibility of Demandware's on-demand platform we were able to add more bandwidth as needed prior to and during the promotion. As a result the promotion was a huge success and made a great first impression with so many new customers."   

Don't become the next poster child for the importance of capacity planning

With the holiday rush quickly approaching, it's more important than ever that you and your ecommerce partner are prepared for and anticipate an increase in traffic. Don't be left in the dark like Target because your customers, no matter how loyal they are, will not tolerate site slowdowns and outages. Are you prepared?

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Disclaimer: By clicking on any of the hyperlinks included in this article you will leave Demandware, Inc.'s website. Demandware assumes no responsibility for information or statements you may encounter on the Internet outside of Demandware's website.

For more information on Demandware

Christine Major is the Corporate Communications Manager for Demandware and can be reached at cmajor (at) demandware (dot) com or tweeting at @cmajor.  For more information on Demandwrae

*This is a guest post from Steven Kroll from our LINK partner Advanse sharing what they have created using our recently announced Open Commerce APIs.

eMerchandisers live in a tough world. You are not protected by geographical boundaries or high search costs to find alternatives. Leaving your store does not mean a drive to the next town – but just a click. These facts create a very competitive online marketplace – which is great for consumers, but can be challenging for an eMerchandiser. 

Traditionally, eMerchandiser's primary tool for finding new customers has been paid search. Once you have those customers, you can keep communicating with them through email marketing. This combination is very effective and easy to measure – you know exactly which campaigns, ads or emails produced what results. However, this has not been possible with display ads, which is why so many eMerchandisers do not include them in the marketing mix. 

However – the digital world is rapidly evolving and banner advertising is making the same jump. Here are some stats to consider: 

• Only 10% of all consumer time on the web is with search.*
• Display advertising grew 21% in 2010 and 23% in first half of 2011**
• Display advertising spend will eclipse paid search in 2015***

As a result, display advertising is now the fastest growing marketing channel. This market growth is spurring innovation in the advertising space as ads move from static 1.0-print-format-cousin, to a dynamic web 2.0 engaging format. These enhanced ads are what Google is betting on. 

In a recent blog post, Google's vice president of display advertising, Neal Mohan said, "over 40 percent of online Americans will name display ads as their favorite ad format." The idea is that, like paid search ads, display ads will actually become helpful - providing information at the right time and in a format that makes it easy to access or buy products that are relevant to consumers. 

So where does this leave eMerchandisers? It means that display advertising will most likely become part of your marketing mix at some point in the future – if it isn't already. But don't worry – you don't need to use static ads, but instead a Banner 2.0 version that delivers dynamic banner applications. 

In a Perfect Ad… 

If you could describe the perfect ad format (something you contemplate often I am sure!) it would be one that could be updated in real-time. It would connect to your store, instantly pulling your latest deals. It would keep track of everything, optimizing your creative on-the-fly and automatically fixing itself. It would allow for consumers to purchase your product from the ad unit without having to leave the site they are on. You would know exactly which ad produced which sale. It would sort of act as a Digital POS (point of sale) that can extend your storefront to any site that accepts ads. 

Advanse is working on creating just that. Our technology, Advanse Ads, allows advertisers to deliver dynamic, data-driven ads that can be updated in real-time. Demandware is a leading commerce platform provider which recently released its Open Commerce APIs. By integrating Advanse Ads with Demandware's Commerce platform via these Open Commerce APIs, we now have the potential to enable Demandware and Advanse customers to create opportunities for new revenue streams and further engage with consumers in the buying cycle.

APIs may seem like a "so-what" technical feature – but we believe that it is rather significant. For example, Demandware's customers will now be able to leverage technologies developed by other companies that elect to make theirs compatible with its platform through its Open Commerce APIs.

By leveraging Advanse and Demandware technologies, customers will be able to bring their online stores to any website that accept ads to ultimately turn a customer's online store into a Digital POS.

Check out the cool example to the left of how Advanse is using Demandware's Open Commerce APIs to develop dynamic data-driven ads. We would love to get your thoughts or answer any questions you might have. Want to talk? email me at steve (at) advansenow (dot) com.

*        Pew Internet Study

  **    IAB / PWC Study Sept 2011

   *** eMarketer

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Disclaimer: By clicking on any of the hyperlinks included in this article you will leave Demandware, Inc.'s website. Demandware assumes no responsibility for information or statements you may encounter on the Internet outside of Demandware's website. 

Steve Krol is the founder and CEO of Advanse, a display advertising automation provider headquartered in the Chicago area. Advanse helps advertisers achieve better advertising performance through automation by using their Advanse Ads technology. Prior to founding Advanse in 2008, Steve worked as consultant in the eCommerce industry for 12 years.

By Rob Garf

Recently, during the Cross-Channel Retail Executive Summit, we initiated and facilitated a discussion with more than 20 leading marketing, ecommerce and IT executives across multiple segments including footwear, apparel, sporting goods and other specialty retailers to explore the state of online commerce. The output from that conversation resulted in a detailed mandate for ecommerce technology providers, which we shared publicly today on www.digitaldirectives.org.

"The Digital Directives: a Commerce Technology Manifesto" is the first of its kind in the industry. The commerce community has devoted years – and countless definitions and acronyms – to the discussion around what retailers need to do to better engage with and enhance brand engagement with the ever-changing consumer. They need to innovate faster and deliver seamless experiences across devices and channels. We all know that, but how can retailers act on these objectives when they are handcuffed to antiquated technologies and ineffective partnerships that create more burden than benefit?

We initiated this conversation because, as a technology provider, we understand the challenge that retailers are facing, and we know that retailers and vendors can collaborate more effectively for greater success. Furthermore, we believe that positive and unique brand experiences are largely dependent on the technology and tools that vendors provide to retailers. 

We've heard a lot about how retailers need to deliver better brand experiences, but we've never heard from the retailers about what they need from technology vendors to make those initiatives a reality. Now retailers are speaking out with a unified voice, and they've delivered seven directives that look beyond the need to simply innovate faster, with an eye toward changing vendor-retailer relationships and the technology that powers them. These Digital Directives are:

"The Digital Directives" challenge technology and solution providers to partner with retailers in more meaningful, strategic, sustainable, and mutually beneficial ways. And yes, a good portion of that charge speaks to providing retailers with the tools and resources they need to be more creative and nimble. Yul Vanek, VP of IT at Deckers Outdoor who participated in the discussion, summed it up nicely by saying, "Internal teams must be allowed to focus on business enablement, user experience, and systems integration. We don't want to be in the software development business."

Influence the Mandate: Join the Discussion 

Over the coming months, we will hold a series of panel discussions in various cities where retailers and brands can discuss and debate the implications of "The Digital Directives." Representatives of retailers and branded manufacturers are invited to attend these exclusive events and influence the mandate through these open discussions.

 The first events will take place in New York City on October 25 and in San Francisco on October 27. Each will consist of a panel of retail executives and industry influencers and will be moderated by Jeffrey Rayport, operating partner with Castanea Partners, during the New York City event and Cathy Hotka, principal with Cathy Hotka & Associates, during the San Francisco event.

For more information about The Digital Directives and these events, email digitaldirectives@demandware.com. The Digital Directives manifesto can be found at www.digitaldirectives.org.

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Rob Garf is VP of product and solutions marketing for Demandware and can be reached at rgarf (at) demandware (dot) com.

By Mary Halladay

Bill Bass, Shop.org Board member and President of Charming Shoppes, presented a keynote session at the Shop.org Annual Summit titled: 5 Lessons Learned in 15 Years of Cross Channel Retailing.  Mr. Bass was quite clear that he derived these lessons from his experiences and that they represented his opinions. I appreciated this clarity as sometimes keynote presentations have a "reading-from-scripture" type quality to them when in fact no one person's lessons are going to apply perfectly to anyone else's situation. Having spent almost 12 years myself in the online retail space, I thought I would take a minute to review his lessons to see how they resonate based on my own experiences.

Lesson 1:  eCommerce is not just another store (and nor is it just another marketing channel).  I'd have to agree wholeheartedly with this lesson and would also probably put it at the top of my own list.  You can't fit an ecommerce site into an existing paradigm.  It is a unique channel with its own rules and road map to success.  What surprises (okay, baffles) me, is that there are companies that still give very little thought (and less budget) to usability and web experience optimization.  I heard it time and time again in usability studies that consumers believe if a company's web site is sub optimal, their products must be also.

Lesson 2:  Org Structure Matters.  While I agree pretty wholeheartedly that org structure does matter, I'm not on board with some of the specifics that Mr. Bass detailed.  He is of the opinion that the ecommerce group should be separate (versus combined) and that the team should report directly to the CEO.   I don't believe you can take a "one size fits all" approach to organizational structure.  Invariably, when asked about the best way to structure for ecommerce success, my response begins with…."It depends."  Some of the things it depends on are relative importance of the direct to consumer effort for the company as a whole, level of potential channel conflict, and internal "enlightenment" related to ecommerce being more than another store and not just another marketing channel (see Lesson 1). 

Lesson 3: Focus, Focus, Focus  (don't be distracted by bright shiny objects.)   It's easy to agree that focusing is key but it's really REALLY hard to do, especially in the digital space where things are evolving at an incredibly fast pace.  This is an area where I wish Mr. Bass had provided some examples where he saw great success from maintaining his focus.  Mr. Bass was fairly dismissive of QR codes, but I think retailers should develop an approach to QR codes and start testing how their consumers like to use them; I think Mr. Bass is short changing a communication vehicle that can be pretty effective in delivering digital communication in a way that enhances the consumers brand and shopping experience.

Lesson 4: Pay Attention to Lesson 3 but also take advantage of new capabilities.  Mr. Bass didn't give up the "secret tips" in this area either.  His mantra of optimized site search and fast check out as the two key elements to digital success comes into play here.  Maybe there are new capabilities around these two areas that should be a priority versus a new technology?  I wish Mr. Bass was a bit more detailed and someone with 15 years experience could provide a primer on how to tell the valuable new capabilities from the shiny objects.  Perhaps that is what I'll learn in the next three years.

Lesson 5:  What's Ahead.  Mr. Bass wrapped up by identifying one thing he thinks is really important (the iPad) and two things that he thinks are important but perhaps getting too much attention (smartphones and social media).  While I agree about the iPad, I think Mr.  Bass might not be extending Lesson 1 to these "new" capabilities.  He is discounting the power of the smartphone and social media because it has been difficult to fully monetize around the consumer adoption.  What would happen if senior level retailers thought that way about building a web site 15 years ago?  Mr. Bass also said that in the not so distant future (he wouldn't be specific and who can blame him!) we'll see 30% of in-store sales shift to the digital channel and he labeled this a "cataclysmic change."  Whether this comes to fruition in three, five or ten years, companies with bricks and mortar stores should start identifying now how they can leverage this transition.

During his conclusion Mr. Bass came up with an unofficial sixth rule of online retailing which I thought was one of the most impactful lessons.   Lesson 6: "Don't Let The Perfect Get in the Way of the Good" is something that all online retailers need to keep in mind.  We are fortunate to have an unprecedented analytic view into our business, but it can also lead to a terminal case of analysis paralysis. Time and effort can be wasted trying to make perfect a business decision when you know it is the right thing to do to help your business.  Sometimes you need to go with your gut instinct and roll out a change that you know can help your business, and not wait for perfect to occur.

I am interested to hear what you thought of Mr. Bass's lessons and if you have any yourself to add to his list?  While we all have unique experiences, are there any digital retail lessons that you would want to share with anyone just starting out in the industry?  If so, contact me at mhalladay(at) demandware (dot) com.

By Michelle Guzzo

In a time when there are 800MM active Facebook users, it is crucial for today's online business to consider how to leverage the ever evolving concept of Social Commerce. While the success of social media on customer engagement has been widely documented, monetizing social activity remains a challenge for retailers of all sizes. Regardless of the open question marks around return on investment, now is the time for retailers to begin experimenting with Social Commerce as this new channel not only drives conversion, but it also touches upon every aspect of the marketing cycle including awareness, decision, recommendation, and action. 

There are a few best practices to follow before expanding into this new eCommerce space:

• Think Scalability --  Develop a short term, mid-term, and long-term strategy that takes into account the growth and capacity needed to keep up with the fast pace of social media.
• Constantly Measure and Set Goals for Success – Do your best to qualify a true ROI for your social commerce efforts and roll that back into your strategic growth plan.
• Be Vigilantly Aware of the Customer Service Aspect of Social Media -- Negative comments from customers on your Facebook page can have a huge impact on your audience and brand.  Be sure to monitor and react to your customers in a timely and constructive manner.  
• Leverage Your Social Champions – Leverage your existing customers and Facebook fans to spread the word about your business can greatly pay off.  Consider viral promotions (i.e., "Become our Facebook Fan and gain exclusive offers and promotions!")
• Incorporate Social Features with Mobile – By leveraging QR codes or other in-store point of sale mediums, the customer is able to become more fully entrenched with your brand.  Consumer reviews is a great first step in connecting your social and mobile efforts.
• Move fast and be willing to Make Mistakes – Don't stop testing new ideas and concepts!   Test, learn, and evolve.   You are true pioneers in the space and timid retailers rarely make headlines.

The core principle of social media is connection so don't forget to have fun with your social community and experiment.   As a retailer, listening to your customers and monitoring activity is a key principle to turning "Likes" and "Fans" into customers and orders.

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Michelle Guzzo is an ecommerce strategist for Demandware. She can be reached at mguzzo@demandware.com.

By Sue Chapman

Looking at your null results list is a great way of finding out what shoppers are trying to buy, but not able to find on your site. By doing so, you can see just how much money you might be leaving on the table.

There are two kinds of shoppers – Searchers and navigators. Searchers are surgical shoppers, know what they are looking for and are generally more ready to buy. They also spend more and convert up to 300% better – a retailer's dream customer. These are the customers you want to create a great user experience for and you do this by reducing the annoying "No Results" pages which will drive these shoppers from your site and onto your competitors' site.

During the Shop.org Annual Conference, I participated on the "40+ specific things you can do to make more money next week" panel where I shared several ways in which retailers can tap into the buying power of these shoppers by analyzing these null or no result searches.

My advice was to create a bucket list that includes all the reasons shoppers received that pesky "no results" page. The process is simple. Copy your top no results into a spreadsheet for the last week or so.  Assign each search term a bucket number to determine why this specific term returns no results.

Below are some examples of how each of these buckets can turn into targeted, meaningful results.

Bucket #1 – Customer Spelling / Terminology – For products with unique names that customers can't spell and the spell checker doesn't recognize, simply create synonyms to match up the shopper term to products in your online catalog.

Bucket #2 – Recommending Alternative Products – For high profile no result terms, create synonyms to alternative products or create a new seasonal category and cross categorize alternative products into the new category with a lifestyle banner.

Bucket #3 - Out of Season / Pre-Season Products - Analyzing no results is a way to measure real-time demand for seasonal products.  Put these products online when the search request level warrants it.

Bucket #4 - No Longer Available or Obsolete Products – For styles that you no longer carry, up-sell shoppers to the latest styles by creating a one-way synonym with the style name pointing to the style IDs of the new replacement or similar products. 

Bucket #5 – Product Not Sold – Possible Product Expansion - Using no results is an effective way to measure demand for products you don't sell and should be factored into your product expansion plans.

Bucket #6 – Product Not Sold – No Alternative Products – Don't have what they are looking for and nothing to recommend?  Create a merchandised no results page.  Create a holiday no result strategy pointing to the gift guide or gift certificates to reduce abandonment. 

 Potential Returns 

You only have two choices to show your customers - no results or something they actually might be interested in. 

One example I shared involved an apparel retailer who I worked with to improve their issue with no results. The process was simple. We reviewed the top 100 no-results terms and created about 25 synonyms that would show alternative results such as "baby dolls" equals "pajamas." We then did a week before and a week after analysis. The result was a dramatic increase over 1000% in the number of orders, overall merchandise total and AOV. The conversion rate also just about tripled.

By taking some time to analyze what's behind all your no results, you can tap into these lost sales. And the best part is that this is not just a onetime increase in sales or conversion rate. This is a gift that keeps on giving week after week as site searchers have a more positive user experience with a richer product result set to buy from.  It is truly a "win-win" situation.

Disclaimer: By clicking on any of the hyperlinks included in this article you will leave Demandware, Inc.'s website. Demandware assumes no responsibility for information or statements you may encounter on the Internet outside of Demandware's website.

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Susan Chapman is director, merchandising practice for Demandware. She can be reached at schapman@demandware.com

By Rick Kenney

Remember Linda Richman from Saturday Night Live's Coffee Talk? Whenever overcome with emotion, she would ask the audience to talk amongst themselves about a topic that was neither this, nor that. Well, she would have been proud of this deal of the day-focused session. As it turns out, the trend for retailers employing – and succeeding – with deal of the day is transforming the rules – the new strategy is neither (strictly) a deal, nor or is it necessarily "of the day."

Rather, retailers need to create a dynamic 'moment of engagement' that implores customers (new and returning) to visit and convert.

As explained during the Shop.org session, "The Next Generation of Retail – New rules, New approaches: How retailers can succeed with daily deal and flash sale campaigns," for Neiman Marcus, the moment is a brief two-hour flash sale offered 2-3 times per week. The retailer found success through email driven traffic to their short-run discounted boutique. Importantly, the flash sale can share a cart with the full site, enabling an order comprised not simply of discounted merchandise, but full price as well. Their 'Midday Dash' is a pleasant surprise that appears in your inbox 2-3 times a week, but is consistently timed at 11:30 CT.

For Lifetime Brands, the moments are ongoing – a daily discount focused on housewares found at www.housewaresdeals.com.  Speaker, Jeff Berman, president retail direct and ecommerce for Lifetime Brands, cited the balance of scarcity, immediacy and customer engagement in social channels as the right equation for his brand's deal of the day success.

Skuloop's Michelle Crames appealed to retailers to strengthen these moments by creating an emotional connection between their customers and the brand.

Moderator Rob Schmults grounded the session in reality – while daily deal traffic is up 128% year-over-year, it is not quite the bastion of acquisition that some have touted, as 65% of daily deal shoppers have previously purchased through the brand.

Given this landscape, what should you, as a retailer/brand, do about these flash sale/deal of the day opportunities? Here are a few actions that can help you get started:

-          Reward your customer: Test a flash sale/deal of the day as a reward for your (best) customers. You can also drive customer acquisition by allowing your best customers to invite friends to the sale.

-          Be Immediate: Lifetime Brands deal of the day is active by the time you receive the email. Give your customers a chance to pounce on the deal.

-          Keep the operations simple: With a high frequency of flash sales, Neiman's uses seasonal creative design instead of sale-specific creative. By making the marketing easy to execute, you can focus on other items, like the deal itself or the customer qualification (the list).

-          Evolve your concept: Jeff Berman spoke of plans to extend their deal of the day site to drive a higher AOV by offering simultaneous offers in their key merchandising categories. His strategy is founded in over a year of experience – your concept should evolve too – and the data will lead the way.

-          Drive (social) exposure: Lifetime stresses the importance of social exposure to their deals, a fact that was echoed by the entire panel

The 2^nd day's keynote discussion between Ben Fischman of Rue La La and Forrester's Sucharita Mulpuru emphasized some of these same key points. Ben attributed much of their success to the enjoyment and pageantry of the shopping experience on Rue La La. This emotional connection, mixed with the immediacy and scarcity is a powerful combination that clearly answers "the why" – a moment of engagement that a customer can't resist.

Are you creating moments of engagement for your customers? 

Disclaimer: By clicking on any of the hyperlinks included in this article you will leave Demandware, Inc.'s website. Demandware assumes no responsibility for information or statements you may encounter on the Internet outside of Demandware's website.