By Jamus Driscoll, Demandware Marketing

One of the biggest knocks against ecommerce since the beginning of time has been the idea that no matter how great your site is, you cannot replicate the in store shopping experience. While this is true for many sites, some retailers, such as Jones New York, are doing their best to surpass the brick and mortar experience by offering personal service on a large scale.

With a dedicated "Ask the Experts" section of their site, Jones New York offers every customer personal attention. Resident style expert, Lloyd Boston, is always virtually on hand to provide personal fashion advice to shoppers who can submit questions online. As a result, Jones New York provides visitors with a truly personalized shopping experience that leads to happier customers that are more likely to return.

With innovative solutions to age-old problems, companies like Jones New York are breaking free from the traditional confines of the ecommerce status quo. Before long, there's no question that brick and mortar retailers will be looking to examples just like these to improve their own in-store experience. The tables are turned...

By Adam Forrest, Demandware Product Marketing

It's easy to forget that the simplest way for customers to shop your site is for your site to merely be open. That is the beauty of online right, 24/7? Yet over and over again retailers sites go down, sacrificing revenue.

Although my previous post (10 Ways You Know It's Cyber Monday) was aimed at poking fun at the media created "super online holiday," there was a lot of truth to it. And even with a year's worth of preparation for "Cyber Monday," sites still crashed and crashed hard. Cyber Monday's site response times and crashes only underline the major risks of running the entire infrastructure internally.

StorefrontBacktalk.com did an excellent keeping a running dialog on Twitter letting people know which sites were down or experiencing longer than usual load times. They were getting their information from a variety of trusted sources such as Gomez, Keynote and Pingdom. Follow which sites have gone down by visiting http://twitter.com/SFBackTalk.

We all knew that sites would go down on Cyber Monday, it is inevitable with the amount of legacy homegrown systems out there, but the real disappointment of the day came from the error messaging. Take for example the screenshots below, saying they were down for either scheduled maintenance or were in the process of upgrading. Really? You scheduled maintenance on one of the busiest days of the year? Not very likely.

(Click on thumbnail to view larger image.)

But in order to take the bitter lemons of a site outage and make lemonade, why not take this as an opportunity to merchandise? You know Cyber Monday is going to be a high traffic day for you and you know that most likely there are certain products or promotions that are driving these visitors to your site, so why not highlight these from this page? Give visitors product numbers, prices and an alternative to purchasing online and perhaps you've saved a customer.

Don't sacrifice sales or your brand's reputation by trying to do this all on your own. Concentrate on what you do best and then leverage companies that operate site availability, scalability, and security for you. Hopefully the rest of the holiday season will go smoothly...best of luck!

By Julian Chu, Demandware Client Success

We've all seen the headlines: Just as the retail sector overall is hemorrhaging, even growth in the ecommerce market has come to a standstill. According to the latest statistics from comScore, growth slowed considerably this summer and dropped to just 1% year-over-year in October. Many are predicting even worse for the remainder of the season.

But it's in times like these that leaders emerge, take market share and set themselves up for future success. In Demandware's own client base, we see more than a few companies continuing to post strong growth even up through last week. In a no-growth environment, every site visit is critical, each ad placement a precious investment. So the question for today is, are you prepared to engage in close-quarters, site-to-site combat for consumer market share this holiday season?

Now, more than ever, online retailers need a comprehensive competitive strategy and detailed tactical plan that focuses on retaining existing customers and winning new ones from competitors. The strategy part starts by understanding:

• Who are our target consumers and where/how do they shop?
  
• What is our share of wallet among these customers, in relevant product categories?
  
• Who are our leading competitors? Why would these customers spend their money with these competitors and not with us?

Tactically, retailers need a plan going into the holidays that anticipates and prepares them to respond to the marketing tactics (e.g., campaigns, offers, promotions) of their competitors. Not just planning what campaigns you will launch, but also:

• What will the key competitors do?
  
• How might they respond to our tactics?
  
• How should we respond in turn?

This is all about "war-gaming," thinking through different scenarios and being prepared to launch new campaigns and offers on a daily basis. Pulling this off successfully requires work to be done before the holidays begin, to strategize and develop a tactical plan for key dates in the season. It requires you to have processes and tools in place to monitor what competitors are doing in the marketplace, and to measure how you're faring in comparison.

And, importantly, it requires that you have a flexible technology infrastructure that allows you to prepare different campaigns, offers and promotions ahead of time, and then launch them on a moment's notice when and where needed.

Is your organization prepared to engage in site-to-site combat this year?

If you missed part one of our Countdown to the Holidays series, be sure to check out Part I: Getting the Basics Right.

By Jamus Driscoll, Demandware Marketing

If there's any upside to a commute it's that it provides at least some opportunity for idle thinking. So on the way home last night, breezing North on 93 and beat down by Red Sox doom-and-gloom sports talk, I snapped off the radio and started to idle the old squash. Free form association kicked in and when I blew through the yield sign (nearly T-boning a lime-green hybrid in the process), I thought, "Wow! Now that's a much better model for ecommerce!" Ok, so maybe I should back up and explain that a bit.

Over years of depicting the costs and effort allocation of a typical ecommerce operation, I had evolved into using a tried-and-true pyramid diagram. You know the one. At the bottom was the hardware and infrastructure. It was wide and thick, signifying gobs of energy and cost. Stacked on it were databases, app servers, IT professional support, point applications and other such things-each showing diminishing time and effort. Finally, perched at the very top, with the smallest land mass, was merchandising, marketing and site experience. It always seemed wrong that such important activities would get such a relatively small piece of the pie, but hey that's how things had to be. In fact, analysts point out that up to 80 percent of ecommerce resources (dollars, time and people) are spent simply maintaining the existing infrastructure and processes.

So wrong.

Effectively this means that 80% of an ecommerce operation is going to activities that yield absolutely NO competitive differentiation. For instance, when was the last time a customer went to a site and said, "Kudos. It's up!" or "Hooray! It has secure checkout!"? Likely never and yet that's exactly the type of activities that are getting the most resources.

And that's where the upside down pyramid comes in.

Wouldn't it make more sense if the basic table-stakes portions of the ecommerce operation took up the minority of effort? All the behind-the-scenes work that goes into a professional operation-security, compliance, hardware and database performance, application upgrades etc.-was just there? And instead, retailers could spend more time in the areas that will really drive top line growth. Price management, promotions management, presentation of the assortment, UI innovation... You know the list. This is the stuff that consumers really care about.

So I challenge you commuters out there to make your mindless travel time more productive. Ponder the tough questions and voice your opinions. While no one has the answer, everyone has an opinion-and stringing together enough of these thoughts and opinions can lead to a breakthrough big enough to change the game. Heck, it worked for the Sox, why not us?

What would revenue look like for most operations if these were the areas that received not 20% of the effort, but 80%?

Are there really people out there who would prefer to spend their time worrying about site uptime and secure checkouts rather than marketing, merchandising and selling their products?

What steps are you taking to turn the ecommerce status quo on its head?

By Scott Todaro, Demandware Product Strategy

Searchandising involves the combining of site search capabilities directly with a product catalog to present products the way the merchandiser wants them sort ordered. The term searchandising and the technology behind it was born from search vendors looking to expand their product footprint beyond the search key in order to give the merchandiser greater control over search results. Since 80% of all shopping trips start with some type of search-such as keyword, guided navigation or parametric-it is an important component of every ecommerce site. The question is: How is this different than the search and merchandising capabilities currently provided by your ecommerce platform?

For most transaction-based websites, the product catalog resides in the ecommerce platform. The catalog is the center of all online merchandising since cross-sells, pricing and promotions are usually tied to the products contained within. In order for merchandisers to optimize product search results, search capabilities need to be tightly integrated with the catalog for making real-time adjustments. This includes the ability to react in real-time to low inventory levels, high sales velocity and competitive pressure for improving customer satisfaction, driving sales and beating the competition.

An example of ecommerce platform driven search merchandising is delivering relevant cross-sells in search results for driving incremental sales. A second scenario is connecting inventory levels with search relevancy ranking to help an online retailer automatically demote low stock items in search results and promote high inventory products at the top of the sort order.

Many ecommerce platforms today offer cutting edge search functionality tied with relevancy ranking rules for automating the product presentation process as a standard feature. Over the past 4 years, platform vendors have made huge strides in improving search by adding guided navigation, natural language search and various other methods for helping customers quickly, easily and accurately find products. Some of these ecommerce platforms have tied this functionality directly to the product catalog for ease of use, full control and better merchandising results.

So the question must be asked: Is searchandising something new and useful, or is it marketing hype created by search vendors?