We had 20 minutes to discuss our views of mobile commerce. Being the second presentation we had the opportunity to set the scene and fortunately for us Paul Ramshaw from Hybris 1^st up gave us a great setup. 

Our view of the world is:

That mobile commerce to date has been focused on three primary things

• Having a mobile web presence
• Building an app usually iPhone
• The ability to take mobile orders

This has led to mobile commerce delivering product content through a fairly flat and list driven customer experience. Often the experience is fragmented and inconsistent across web, mobile web and apps.  In the past this has been down to the complexity and diversity of device OS and platforms as well as limited investment in mobile.  The growing adoption of Android and HTML5 as mobile platforms are simplyfing things technically and budgets for mobile commerce are steadly increasing.

Based on the discussions I have had with clients and partners the general consensus is that customers are expecting more from the mobile experience.  Smart phones and tablets are raising customers’ expectations from just quick find / order taking to engaging with  deeper customer experiences that can deliver more than lists of flat product content.  This is opening opportunities for retailers to use more persuasive content and experiences to merchandise their products through mobile devices.

Ecommerce has enabled retailers to combine the elements product, promotion, content and the customer to deliver sophisticated online shopping experiences that engage the customer and drive sales.  Today the mobile world brings the element of context, a factor that enables retailers to personalise a online shopping experience that previously we in ecommerce could only dream of. 

The real challenge for mobile commerce is the ability to deliver the right experience, content and promotions depending on the customer context such as browsing on an iPad while watching TV, checking prices in store or looking for the latest deals while traveling on the train or a thousand other scenarios.

I hope you enjoy the video. I didn’t realise my head looked so round.

to see more videos see  http://www.internetretailing.net/mobile-videos/#self

10CMS has always been at the cutting edge of frontend technology building interactive merchandising interfaces for retailers. In the past 5 years Flash has dominated the landscape when it comes to developing rich web components and 10CMS has not only adopted Flash as a technology but also built an extensive SDK geared towards rapidly building interactive Flash merchandising applications bringing together the experiences and best practices from previous client projects. 

Although, Flash is a superb technology for delivering rich interactive experiences it doesn’t come without its challenges and the innovation in browser technologies and the arrival of HTML5 seemed to be providing some very exciting prospects for 10CMS. 

The Canvas API investigation

HMTL5 is a set of new features that are added to the HTML4 specification including APIs for 2D drawing (Canvas), media (audio /video), local storage and offline apps.  The most relevant areas to start our investigations considering the functionality required to implement Flash functionality is the 2D drawing Canvas tag.  

Canvas as the name suggests is literally a canvas bitmap with an API for which a developer can use to programmatically draw complex shapes, images and text as well as manage simple animations and styling.  This is a massive improvement for HTML developers as at last they can add configurable complex shapes and animations into HTML mark-up without relying on libraries of images. 

The initial investigation attempted to answer the question –

Can the HTML5 Canvas tag be used to reproduce 10CMS Flash modules which include rich imagery, sophisticated interactions and product data?

The premise we assumed was that all graphical elements and actions are contained and managed within a single canvas, taking the approach of a canvas representing what we would previously regarded as a Flash SWF object.  The implications are that we would not use the HTML DOM model or CSS to affect or style any of the graphical elements.

We set out by first experimenting with the Canvas API / JavaScript implementing the equivalent exercises that most ActionScript 3 developers start with when learning Flash including drawing, simple animation and bitmaps.  We then moved onto to building several interactive modules such as simple carousels and look-books. It was immediately apparent that while the Canvas API contains the rudimentary functions required for drawing and manipulating graphics, building purely with the Canvas API becomes very code intensive and involves building layers of code to wrap and implement more sophisticated concepts such as sprites and layers.

What we concluded from our initial investigations and experiments that simply using the HTML5 Canvas API alone is not suitable for handling the complexity apparent in building rich merchandising applications that are delivered by 10CMS.  What is required is either further development of the Canvas API or JavaScript libraries that provide a framework abstraction for graphical extensions that AS3/Flash developers have become accustomed to.  

The next stage of our investigation focused on searching for existing JavaScript libraries that manage graphical elements in the Canvas tag.  Despite many new libraries springing up with the intention of solving this problem and delivering functionality for advanced 2D drawing, charting and in some cases Sprite management. We found that although these JavaScript libraries provide light weight graphic frameworks they are targeted at specific areas and many were basic, unfinished or inappropriate for building more sophisticated merchandising apps or providing a foundation for the 10CMS HTML5 SDK. 

The best libraries we investigated were

Doodle.JS – http://lamberta.org/doodle-js/

ProcessingJS – http://processingjs.org/

EaselJS – http://easeljs.com/

There are several others listed on JavaScript Open Libraries site

http://javascript.open-libraries.com/utilities/drawing/10-best-javascript-drawing-and-canvas-libraries/

Here is the video for the presentation I did back in September at Internet Retailing Jumpstart. The challenge set was to put together a short presentation (20 – 30 mins) on the important issues retailers will face in ecommerce in the next twelve months and how technology and platforms can help solve these problems.  The 10CMS presentation was split into two parts

• Rory Dennis director of client services introduction and quick run through of 10CMS. Demonstrating how retailers use 10CMS to create interactive merchandising modules. 
• I presented the second half around the 12 min mark discussing the challenges of delivering rich user experiences in a world where everything is changing.

The summary of my section :

• First problem for retailers: Application platforms have proliferated with iOS, Flash, Java ME, Symbain, Windows Mobile and webOS, etc – this requires separate developments across multiple platforms!
• Second problem for retailers: Browser are becoming more like application platforms with the adoption of technologies such as HTML5 – but the implementation of HTML5 standards is not yet consistent across all browsers and the technology lacks supporting frameworks and libraries. Building interactive experiences to support multiple browsers with graceful degradation corresponding to browser capability can cause substantial extra development.
• Third problem for retailers: Web-site and application user experience are converging. The expectations for on- site user experience are changing as the use of  mobile and social applications increases, however, re-engineering a site is expensive 
• The solution: the abstration of user experience form the underlying ecommerce  platform
• Future 10CMS architecture:  How 10CMS will deliver interactive modules and applications across multiple technologies (including HTML5 and Flash)  and platforms form web and mobile web to  mobile and social Appa.

The presentation was concluded with a discussion on the high level road-map and questions from the audience. 

If you are interested in seeing videos for other presentations at jumpstart here is the link to the Internet Retailing 2010 Jumpstart event.

I was extremely fortunate to have a great panel

Simon Harrow CTO Kiddicare.com – explained in detail how Kiddicare.com is using social networking to support their entire business from buying and customer service to promotions and recommendations.  Simon led a passionate and engaging discussion regarding mobile and how it will be the primary device for ecommerce in the future.

Andy Houston Marketing Director of Venda – discussed how Venda’s clients are using social networking in new and innovative ways such as Jimmy Choo’s find a trainer hunt using Twitter and Foursquare.  As always Andy is a veritable fountain of knowledge churning out some extremely detailed and interesting facts and analysis about the use of mobile across Venda clients

Mark Adams Commercial Director of Portaltech – provided the steady voice of reason putting some rigour and method around when and how to use social networking – “focus on what you are trying to achieve and not just create something because everybody else is”.  Mark used the same logic when it came to Mobile advising to look at your traffic profiles before building apps for specific devices. If iOS is 80% of your traffic why build Android Apps?

Mark Allardice Creative Director of Pod1 – Brought his creativity to bare on social networking discussing the LK Bennett Facebook application which uses user generated content as well as other exciting projects such as incorporating social content from Facebook and Twitter directly into ecommerce sites.

It seemed the social and mobile theme carried on throughout the day in the later presentations and in chats with other delegates and visitors.  I have a particularly in-depth alcohol fuelled discussion about social shopping with two creative directors Mark from Pod1 and Steve from Venda -  Is adding a standard shopping experience to a Facebook page really going to work?  I think we agreed you needed to do more than just replicate your shop in Facebook and to look at how you can embed a shopping experience within the Facebook framework and how Facebook users really use their apps – being a consummate Facebook gamer and seeing the constant stream of strange posts on my wall for fortune cookies, hugs, gifts, magical tokens and to join some medieval alliance, I can see how fitting a marketing message for a sale might need a bit of creative thinking.

I also really enjoyed the Michael Robinson, Head of Ecommerce for Anthropologie slot where he described how Anthropologie created unique shopping experiences in store even using scented candles. Another interesting point was the mixing-up of products to create a jarring experience of discovery.  Looking at a shirt and finding you may also need a new rug.  An experience he relates to rummaging in a car boot sale.  Also every Anthropology store in the US is an individual boutique.  The challenge they found is trying to replicate this online, Michael explained that Anthropologie uses techniques not available in store such as using rich media and imagery.   There were interesting points of how Anthropologie have organisationally incorporated the online functions into the main function lines – online marketing reports to Marketing director etc, unlike many other Bricks and Clicks companies that silo their online channel. 

The controversial quote of the day is Web is Dead and will be replaced by Apps from Jimmy Hale ATG. He believes the use of mobile and the rise of applications will see the use of web sites diminish.  In the presentation I gave a couple of weeks ago at IR Jumpstart I concluded that users are expecting websites to behave more like apps and technologies such as HTML5  and Flash are moving browsers towards being more like application platforms, therefore the web will evolve not dissolve.

All in all Internet Retailing was pretty cool this year and was very well attended, with some useful insights from the presentations and workshops.

Next up Ecommerce Expo – I don’t understand why ecommerce events occur when retailers are in their busiest time.

In the last two years there have been a series of mergers and acquisitions that have completely changed the landscape of search vendors.  This only goes to re-enforce the point I made previously that search in retail is commoditized and reached a level at which innovation in functionality is left to smaller iterative improvements, and the future for search is to not as a stand alone service but as an integral component of a larger vision for ecommerce. 

But how have all these Acquisitions played out and what can we expect from retail search in the future?

• Fast was the first to be acquired by Microsoft back in 2008 and since then there has seemed little focus on retail and more focus on SharePoint integration.
• Mercado was acquired by Ominture which made sense in the pursuit of closing the loop for personalization and merchandising.  However, Omniture was recently acquired by Adobe and my discussions with Omniture now leave me unclear to what their actual roadmap and strategy is.  It seems that the Ominiture product set will remain as a suite of loosely coupled products (e.g. Mercado, sitecatalyst). Adobe has it all the components necessary to create an extremely interesting story for retailers around personalization, merchandising and search.  However, at the moment this story is left to the imagination of retailers and system integrators.  What is needed is a clear strategy and roadmap for all their commerce related products such as Mercado, Omniture and Scene 7.
• Fred Hopper’s price point and licensing model has enabled it to gain a lot of traction in the SME commerce market, however, it was also acquired very recently by SDL who also own the Tridion CMS. SDL PR and marketing are boasting that the acquisition of Fred Hopper adds targeting and marketing to their portfolio with SDL releasing a Fred Hopper and Tridion integration called SmartTarget in Q2 this year.  This acquisition may allow SDL to sell Fred Hopper into other markets and enable SDL to enter the ecommerce and retail market, but whether the combination of Tridion and Fred Hopper will provide any additional value to retailers or whether there will be any new innovations remains to be seen.
• Autonomy, which is rarely considered for retail search also acquired the Interwoven CMS.  This fits well with its overall strengths in unstructured content and I have seen no further indication that they will focus any further attention to commerce and retail.
• Endeca is now the last man standing in terms of big pure play search.  Endeca competitors seem to be suffering from a loss of focus and pace which is usual following any M&A activity.  This along with recent developments including page builder and the SEM modules has placed it above its competitors in commerce and retail search.  Their recent strategic alliance with the Hybris who provides an eCommerce and Product Information Management (PIM) platform show that Edenca continues to invest in commerce and retail.   The interesting thing about the strategic alliance is that it is not just about marketing, in fact Endeca and Hybris have created a joint development team working at integrating the two platforms.  If done right this could bring some exciting new developments across all search and eCommerce functionality.  It will also be interesting to see how they deal with the usual clash over which system will control the front-end and user experience.

Search plays an important role in the positioning of products to customers. Whether helping customers find the specific products they are looking for or to simply browse a product catalogue, search is pivotal in converting customers from browsers to buyers. It has been these obvious benefits of using search for commerce which has driven specializations in search technology aimed at influencing customer buying behavior.

Enterprise search engines such as Endeca have maintained a strong presence in retail and commerce due to their ability to rapidly access vast repositories of data and provide robust architectures that can scale easily to cope with the demands of high volume transactional websites.  The ambitions of enterprise search for ubiquitous information access and the empowerment of information discovery has seen the arrival of more intuitive methods for exploring information that are particular valuable in retail.  Endeca has been the driving force behind faceted navigation a method which enables multiple navigational paths to any one item of information.  The use of facets to support the exploration of large product catalogues was a key differentiator in retail in the past; however, faceted navigation is now considered a de facto standard within most search applications.

Following the commoditization of faceted search vendors switched their focus to merchandising and product placement.  Enterprise vendors have been reinforcing their position in commerce through the refinement of merchandising functionality which is often consolidated into modules specifically targeted at supporting retailers.  These modules give the ability for retailers to populate areas of a page with products based on rule based queries and are fully integrated into the base platform and can be added relatively easily.  The Fast search engine uses merchandising modules for creating the usual merchandising zones while Endeca have taken things a step further by extending their merchandising workbench to allow business users to take complete control over a pages dynamic content and layout using their page builder extension.  This also gives the ability for websites to create dynamic landing pages based on any search term to providing specific merchandising landing pages for brands, categories and click through from paid for search. 

There have been number of retail specific search engines such as Mercardo and Fred Hopper which have concentrated solely on commerce and retailers.  The relative advantage of these retail specific search engines is the depth of knowledge and expertise that comes from specializing in a specific sector. This is made apparent in the maturity of their business tools and interfaces which are both intuitive and highly relevant for retail business users.  Mercado for instance embeds merchandising into the very core of its platform.  Allowing business users to have complete control of where and when products are placed, whether in search results, facets or in targeted ads.  

The question is what is the future for search vendors in retail and commerce? 

I believe the answer does not lie in iteratively adding more bits of functionality to a search platform but in how a search engine plays an important part in the whole solution for commerce.  Search engines are no longer needed as point solutions to address specific problems such as navigating complex catalogues and simple product targeting.  Instead, retailers are craving higher level solutions for commerce strategies to drive and manage their businesses. 

It is in delivering these larger commerce strategies where retail search engines should start to focus their efforts, However this requires them to integrate more closely with of an increasingly complex ecosystem of ecommerce technologies ranging from analytics, eCRM, ecommerce platforms, search, personalization and multi variant testing tools not to mention the wider role of backend technologies ERP, fulfillment, finance and buying systems in supporting these strategies.  Typical examples of commerce strategies where retail search can play a crucial role include closed loop and personalised merchandising in which the targeting of products is constantly refined and influenced by customer behavior.   

For these strategies to be effective retail search engines needs to incorporate new sources of data in their indexes and interact in new ways with other systems in order to provide enhanced customer experiences and sophisticated tooling that businesses need.

I thought I would start this blog with a summary of my latest thoughts around eCommerce platforms which I presented at eCommerce Expo recently.  In this presentation I make the analogy between the journey a business takes when it comes to eCommerce platforms to that of a person navigating the property ladder. 

When I first moved to London from the North East to start my IT career in the role of an analyst programmer for Reuters, I was unsure about how it would turn out and after university I had little financial support or security.  I actually slept on a friend’s floor for the first few months until I got myself established. I then rented my first place in West Kensington, a very small studio flat located fairly close to the office.  This suited my (very) basic personal needs (tiny place to sleep, shower, some personal space, cooking facilities and close to work) and matched what I could afford at the time.   As it turned out I had some great times there and fortunately my career soon flourished.  

This is somewhat similar to a fledgling start-up ecommerce businesses whether a completely new business or an existing retail brand goes online – they are often uncertain as to their future revenues, have basic requirements (home/landing pages, browse, product details, basket, checkout, payments, etc) and their budgets for development are very limited.  In this case, businesses usually opt to try and build their own site from some open source framework, use a low cost service such as eBay or engage a SaaS based eCommerce provider.  These options simply get you up and running with the bare minimum that you need to sell products online.

Once I became more established at work and socially connected in London I started to outgrow the studio.  I desperately needed more functional space to live in. I had no room and so much stuff.  Having a shower, kitchenette and bed in the same small room started to loose it quaintness and it was not a place where I could invite my friends for dinner.  At this time I was still not in a position to buy especially at the crazy property prices in London, so I rented a slightly larger flat. It was still quite restrictive in space but met my immediate needs perfectly.   

 This is what I have encountered time and time again in online retailers reach a point in which they outgrow their start-up platform and look to re-platform as they require more functionality on the site, better tools to manage the business and increased scale.  Often these businesses are not yet in a position to buy, implement or even manage a fully fledged enterprise ecommerce platform so they move to SaaS platforms such as Snow Valley or Fresca. 

Alternatively, they may try to augment their home-grown platform with specialist technologies to address specific pieces of functionality and resolve particular technology issues.The most common areas I’ve been involved with in these types of situations are:

• Improving search, browse and merchandising using software like Endeca
• Improving content management by integrating with a CMS (e.g. Fatwire, Episerver)
• Adding mediated product ratings and reviews(Bazaarvoice, Buzzilions)
• Adding product recommendations Cetona and Baynote
• Managing product information and catalogues (Hybris PIM)

The next stage in many people’s lives’ is they meet someone live together and get married.  If you are still in your comfortable bachelor pad you may find that you need more flexibility in terms of décor and interior design as well as more space for the masses of shoes you’ll no doubt inherit.  I think a whole blog post could be devoted to women, their shoes and a man’s inability to understand why. At this time you will start to look for a new property with a whole set of new requirements you wouldn’t have considered before such as the size for a new family and local schools.  Fortunately for me being a technical strategist at heart I had already planned ahead and bought a house before I was married with plenty of capacity, good location for schools, transport links and neutral decoration to act as a blank canvas for my wife’s decorative taste, and yes I had space for those all important shoes.  

Again I have seen many businesses reach a certain point where the SaaS based services seem to become too restrictive for the business.  Despite the claims of complete flexibility, SaaS based providers have the problem of trying to balance the flexibility for customisation and the benefits it gets from running a generalised platform e.g. costs, maintenance support, etc.  Once the ecommerce business reaches a point in which their requirements go beyond the stock features and functionality of the SaaS platform, custom development is required. As development is not the core competency of many SaaS providers, businesses will have to contend and wait for development resources to become free. 

Business control can also become an issue as a business matures – an example I have seen is an online business trying to extend its range of offerings to use new third party suppliers which conflicted with the SaaS provider’s business model.  Although, nothing is ever impossible the outcome usually results in escalating costs, slow response times and friction between the business and the SaaS provider.  Furthermore any new innovative developments in functionality are often shared with the rest of the community making it difficult for mature businesses to define and differentiate themselves.

When an online business is in this situation they start to look at ownership models using licensed platforms and regardless of which supplier they still have the option of a self managed or fully hosted solution depending upon their own internal IT capability and appetite.  At this stage they will find themselves just like a newly wed family searching for a house, looking at a whole new set of requirements they couldn’t have possibly imagined as the technology supplier spins the web of new features, possibilities, platform considerations, integration technologies.  Just like selecting a mobile phone they all seem to be completely essential. 

One of the big problems is that if your are moving from a SaaS platform, all that lovely work you did is lost as SaaS based platforms tend to be closed technologies.  There are also a series of  clandestine meetings conducted with suppliers as the business is afraid of the repercussions if the current supplier finds out about their clever plans to move.   A business, soon finds out that re-platforming on the enterprise system is a huge undertaking taking months of development with the total costs for licensing, infrastructure, and services reaching as high £5 -10 million.

Each move a business makes to a new platform comes at a massive risk and cost.  It takes the focus away from what is core (to SELL) to months of strategy, selections, requirements, development, testing rollout……..

My own experience and talking to my friends in the industry, there seems to be a dizzying number of businesses that   re-platform every 2-3 years.  However, I also have clients who have huge online businesses running on bespoke platforms which are more then 6 years old – although they creaking a bit right now.  I guess the moral of the tale is to be cautious when deciding what platform to choose because what may seem right for today is not necessarily right for tomorrow.  I was always told to stretch to buy the best house I could afford and satisfy the needs over the long run, rather than suffer from the inconvenience and cost of constantly moving.

Video of my presentation for ecommerce Expo http://www.seminarstreams.com/ecom-expo-2.asp