Retail, in the eyes of the everyday customer

Taken from their site…

FetchBack is the Retargeting Company.  On average, 98% of a Web site’s visitors leave without converting. FetchBack ‘fetches’ them back to that site via the industry’s most advanced retargeting platform, FetchBack is the only company that provides retargeting analytics, enabling advertisers to see deeper into their campaigns than ever before. FetchBack Retargeting is easy to implement, and maximizes the conversions that Retargeting has to offer.

Learn more here.

Social Networks have helped us all get many more friends than we imagined possible.  But while our friend list is huge it offers little real life benefit.  That’s where TurnTo comes in.  TurnTo leverages the power of these casual networks in a very specific area: online shopping.

TurnTo is based on a simple idea: unknown customer reviews are OK but opinions of friends matter way more.  TurnTo tells you when people you know have experience that could be helpful.

Curious to see how it works? watch the video:

Tabulatua.com has a live implementation, here is a sample product page.

This seems like a novel idea but it’ll only take off if it hits critical mass.  If.

In a definite sign that ecommerce platform space is getting too crowded Omniture has gone ahead with the purchase of Mercado’s Site Search and Online Merchandising platforms.

Mercado’s customers include: Macy’s, OfficeMax, REI, Overstock.com, B&H Photo Video and Williams Sonoma.

As recently as February ‘08 Mercado was undergoing a re-brand when, in my opinion, they should have been focused on saving their sinking ship.

In the ecommerce world Omniture is one of the few companies that has developed a voracious appetite for acquisitions and in recent years they’ve purchased: Offermatica, Visual Sciences and UK based TouchClarity.

The Mercado business is well known to Omniture and the companies have collaborated on areas like site search and analytics in the past.

Mercado had raised nearly $65 million in VC monies and was bought for a mere $6.5 million.  That’s as good as a bargain deal can get.

In a move to further consolidate control of online payment environments eBay has gone and bought the second largest player Bill Me Later for an all cash transaction of $820 Million.  This is significant because eBay already owns PayPal.  Obviously the company is doing this to realign their business by focussing on strengths because the news also comes with the announcement that eBay will layoff 10% of their global work force.

I find it funny that Bill Me Later which gives shoppers the option to defer payments has chosen to sell itself for an immediate all cash transaction.  How ironic.

The world is slowly slipping into the hands of Super Crunchers.

As every interaction starts getting recorded it will only improve the super cruncher’s ability to mine data and identify powerful causal relationships.  One company offering super crunching services to the eCommerce world is Proclivity.  Their Proclivity Mail platform allows marketers to individually market to customers based on purchasing likelihood, thus maximizing retailer margins.  Think of it this way: if their data mining algorithm identifies you as a motivated prospect with a high price premium tolerance for a specific item then instead of giving a 7% discount they’ll convert you with a 5% discount, thus leaving 2% more for the retailer.  Over thousands of transactions this quickly adds up.

Today Proclivity raised another $5.5 million which means their system will get even more bad-ass.

Led by the former head of BI and data mining at über etailer Bluefly Proclivity could grow to be a very scary company.

Learn more about their founder here.

This morning TechCrunch reports Yahoo! plans to enter the analytics space with the purchase of IndexTools. Microsoft and Google already have their own analytics solutions.

InternetRetailer reports Coremetrics, part of the analytics big 3 has just raised another round of capital. This time London-based private equity firm 3i has invested $60 million into the company bringing total funding to $111 million. In the past year Coremetrics increased its customer base by 46%.

RedEnvelope has been struggling for a year now. Their stock has plummeted 97.2% and now Wells Fargo is tired of bankrolling them. I think she’s ready to pass on now.

Sitting here it looks like RedEnvelope was a solid business so I’ll be curious to find-out just what went wrong. If you have any ideas please let me know.

While in school at Ypsilanti it gave me great pleasure to know a retail giant had first started at our neighbor city. This retail phenomenon was Borders. But as I evolved in the multichannel space I wondered why Borders never considered selling online. Was it because their arrogance made them believe Amazon.com could never replace the community aspect of a store and is this way they brazenly chose to use Amazon.com as their virtual storefront? Could it be they realized they would never out price Amazon so they stuck their head in the ground and imagined Amazon didn’t exist?

Whatever their reason, to me it was clear like many retailers back then and today Borders looked at their online store as a simple self checkout lane. And when you think of it that way it makes perfect sense to outsource the job function. Maybe this explains why Borders has hired two banks to figure out way to sell their business.

So what is the lesson here?

I think Borders underestimated their own customers when they automatically assumed ecommerce was a simple lowest-price-wins game. Sure Amazon had the strength of a huge selection and sure they pioneered customer reviews but they did those things to play on the weakness of retail stores. Amazon knew book stores would take years to expand inventory and this provided a perfect opportunity for Amazon to grow without much resistance. For Borders to buy Amazon’s bluff and believe customer reviews was the secret sauce is foolish. When I buy a book I value the opinion of Jack207 but I place higher value on the opinion of a real expert, someone who professionally reviews books. Amazon had too wide a selection to hire experts so they never went that route but this was an advantage Borders owned. Their other advantage was strong publisher relationships and they should have used it for exclusive author interviews (similar to what they do now). Finally, they should have leveraged store presence and allowed customers to browse locally available books by zip code. The bottom line is Borders should have changed the balance of power by playing on their strengths because despite what Amazon told the world deep in their hearts they knew the ace lay with Borders.

We will miss you.

Omniture has expanded SiteCatalyst to include video analytics. According to the TechCrunch article:

“If you are a marketer who uses videos to spread your message, you can now use Omniture to track metrics like how long people are watching your videos, whether they tend to skip forward in them, the rate at which they drop off, and which particular features in the video players they use.”