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In my other posts, I’ve talked about how to get a large number of products to the web and the difficulties with that.  Reaching the customer is the ultimate goal, not getting better product data to the web.  The customer’s perspective is often forgotten in messaging and marketing literature has a tone of “Look at me!” rather than “How can we help you.”  One technique I used in product management was to create a fictional character and write the user interface scenarios from that character’s perspective.

The same technique can be used from a marketing perspective to keep the site grounded if you remember to mirror your eCommerce site to the natural buying process for a customer.  They start by learning about your products, progress to shopping, then buying, waiting for delivery, and using the product. Of course this is a general approach, but it can be adapted to other areas of focus.   Taking this further, your eCommerce site’s job is to map to that process so that when a customer:

• Is exploring, you are pervasive
• Is shopping, you are selling to them
• Is buying, you make it easy to order
• Is waiting, you are getting the product to them fast

Taking the first bullet point, when the customer wants to learn they are trying to figure out the best product for their needs.  So, they ask questions like what are the products that might work for me?  Do I trust this company? Do my friends have recommendations?  They may touch your site at this point or more likely will be browsing the internet for information.

• Social media footprint: More and more, customers are reaching out to their trusted network first when starting the buying process.  For example, when you need a home service, the first place many people search are Yelp reviews or a Facebook network.  Next, they’ll pose a question to their Facebook page for recommendations.  For products, customers may turn to unbiased reviews or other sources.  Your job is to at least be in the conversation at this point.  A full breakdown of social media campaigns is beyond the scope of this short article – but the one nugget of advice here is to “be real”.  Customers don’t want to be sold to at this stage.  They want real information not marketing fluff, so if you get in the conversation don’t oversell.
• SEO:  Customers are going to use the search engines in tandem with asking their social media options.  Your product info should be prominently displayed when customers are researching your products.  Again, search engine optimization is beyond the scope of eComm, but it is one of the funnels that will drive customers to your site.  And when the search engines crawl your site you need to make sure that all your pages are indexed properly and the right keywords are identified in the meta data.  Bad data or bad links will compromise your search results.
• Affiliate sites:  When searching for your product or similar products, affiliate sites are bound to turn up.  They understand SEO much better than you will because their survival depends on it.  It’s a love/hate relationship with affiliates.  They will expose your pricing mistakes and over-publicize your secret deals, but you can’t ignore them.  You need to embrace them and provide information to them for the product exposure.
• eTailers:  Another route to product exposure is through eTailers.  Unlike affiliates, these sites will sell your product instead of routing them to your site.  They are your coop-itition since you get paid for the sale, but give up more margin.  These sites will pop up right along your site in search results, so make sure you have the right product information and correct pricing sent to these partners.

Once they narrow their options down to a handful of products and they find your site, they’re going to ask questions like what is the best product for my needs?  What are the features of the different products?  What is the best value?  And is it available?  You’re job is to answer these questions efficiently and effectively to sell to a customer who is shopping . . .

• Customized shopping experience:  Target different audiences by giving them their own store whether it is a personalized corporate site, a store for affinity relationships, or a public site.  Each store can share products or have their own special products that aren’t available to the public.  For those customers that span the globe, you can create individual stores for each country and share products or restrict options to the local parts.
• International catalog:  Keep all the product information that you need to educate your customer such as product characteristics, multiple units, technical specifications, and other details in any language.  You can keep all international products in a single catalog and automatically filter products by their location, so for example customers don’t buy a German keyboard in the US.
• Industrial strength configurator:  When your products are more complicated, allow the customer to select between compatible options to see what they cost and when they can get it.  Our configurator solves some of the world’s hardest configuration problems such as telecom equipment, but can easily deal with less complicated products, too.
• Integrated content:  We are an eCommerce tool and realize there more effective ways to handle product literature content.  For that reason, we integrate to external tools such as Adobe that deliver educational content to the sites.
• Faceted browse:  We make it easier for customers to find your products using faceted browse.  The technique lets customers hone in on products by selecting characteristics that are important to them, then refining the products that match.
• Standard configurations:  If a dealer or customer has standard configurations they want to buy on their site, you can incorporate them in their catalog allowing them to use that configuration as a starting point.  Then, individuals can customize it according to their needs.  You can restrict options that are typically available on all models so they won’t be shown on standard configuration.  For example, if a customer has a standard computer they buy in their personal storefront they could use this feature to prevent Microsoft products from displaying because they have an alternative route to purchase the software.
• Merchandise and campaign:  With campaigns you can dedicate landing pages to introduce specials.  Or, use eCoupons to target groups of people for special discounts driving them to the site.  Then, you can suggest additional products or promotions the customer might be interested in or bundle promotional products together at a better price.
• Customized pricing and contracts:  Pricing is one of our specialties.  Our sophisticated pricing solution handles the most complex sales channels such as when there are direct sales with retail promotions, contract prices to large customers, mid-market tiers, and third party fulfillment pricing.  It is all handled elegantly in the same tool world-wide.
• Shopping cart:  In self-service shopping, the customer can load their own shopping cart seeing their savings from different promotions and specials.

When a customer has decided what to buy, you need to make it as quick and painless to make the purchase.  Rather than questions at this point, the customer just wants to get the purchase done and the more time it takes the greater the chance they’ll abandon the purchase.  So, once a customer is ready to buy, make it easy for them . . .

• Social sign in: How many IDs do you have to remember?  You probably use the same ID from site to site and sometimes you have to vary your password depending on the security requirements of the new site.  Make it easy for customers to log in.  Social sign in is one of the easiest ways to do that.
• Quote:  For businesses, a customer can store their products in a quote, then route them to an approver for final purchase.
• Checkout:  When they’re ready to buy, they want to buy with local purchasing options.  Often in the US, we assume customers want to buy with Visa, Mastercard, AMEX, or paypal, but across the globe there are different credit card options like JCB in Japan and Boletto in Brazil that allows customers to pay over time.  If you are supporting global customers, you must be able to support the most common payment options they have.
• Third Party Checkout:  Another option is third party checkout like Amazon, Paypal, or Apple.  This reduces the friction for checkout on less frequented sites allowing the customer to utilize an existing payment process instead of re-entering their data.
• Merchandise:  While in the shopping cart, cross sell items the customer might want to buy or have inadvertently forgotten.  One customer we work with implemented this feature and saw sales of a printer increase 100%.

Once they have bought your product, you must service a customer who is waiting.  At this point, the customer really just wants to know when the product will arrive.

• Order Status:  When the customer is waiting, they can log in, find their order to see status and tracking numbers if it has been shipped.
• Automatic e-mail notification:  When the status of the order changes such as when it is shipped, customers will get an automatic notification letting them know their order has shipped.
• Order history:  If the customer wants to view their order history for an individual or business, they can search by date to see each order and in the case of a business each site and user where the purchase was made.

These points may seem obvious to those of us who are immersed in the process, but for others who are only cursorily involved it helps to list out the points so that you can have an educated conversation with your eCommerce team.  DoubleBlaze is well versed in all the processes and for a case study on how we approached this for Lenovo’s worldwide site servicing thousands of sessions daily you can read it here.

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When a customer has decided what to buy, you need to make it as quick and painless as possible to make the purchase.  A 50% to 75% abandonment rate is not uncommon in the shopping cart.  Baymard Institute has aggregated a number of statistics here which shows various rates from a number of different collectors.  Checkout abandonment is not as high as shopping cart, but it is still real.  Some customers are simply window shopping or want to check shipping rates, but others start to have second thoughts once they get into the checkout process.  To overcome any obstacles, this process needs to be quick and efficient.

The steps might be arranged in a different order, but the customer has to complete this information:

1. Registered user or guest?
2. Enter billing and shipping address
3. Enter payment info
4. Summary page

When customers get to checkout, they have made their decision and just want to get the purchase done.  The more time it takes to complete the greater the chance they’ll abandon the purchase.  That doesn’t mean you can’t upsell, you just have to make it easy.  Amazon’s one-click purchasing is the best example of the most unobtrusive checkout possible which bypasses the first three steps and simply displays the purchase summary.  They have stored the customer ID, billing, shipping, and payment information and the customer acknowledges they want to make the purchase.

Unless your Amazon, though, most product companies won’t have enough customer data to streamline the process, but you can still make your checkout simple.

Guest checkout or sign in

You want your users to register so you can do follow up marketing but customers don’t want to register because they don’t want to get irrelevant information.  So you need to make it enticing and easy to register.  You have a few options for this.  Social sign in is the easiest.  Next, they could do a guest checkout or if they expect to make repeat purchases, they’ll register.

• Guest checkout: They can do a guest checkout, but you should really try to capture their information so you can provide a more personal experience the next time they log in as well as make it easier for customer service and support.  Also, if they do a guest checkout, they’ll need to enter their billing and shipping info.
• Social sign in: How many IDs do you have to remember? You probably use the same ID from site to site and sometimes you have to vary your password depending on the security requirements of the new site.  Make it easy for customers to log in.  Social sign in is one of the simplest ways to do that.  On the back end, you would still capture a shadow user ID in association with the user’s social ID to enable you to store additional info like addresses and preferences but this is hidden from the user and all they have to remember is their Facebook, Google, or LinkedIn ID.
• Custom user id management: The third option is custom user id management. Here you have to store the customers ID and password.  There are different security protocols for passwords and many require a capitol letter, numeral, and symbol but not all.  The tradeoff is that the more rules you require the more likely it is that it won’t match their existing passwords and they’ll forget it.  That drives up customer service issues because customers will call sales support even when they can reset their password automatically.  When you go down this path you’ll need login screens, reset/forgot password, forgot ID, and the data store for user name and encrypted password.  You can make it simpler by using an SSO (single sign on) solution that takes the hassle out of id management, but that is for another discussion.

Regardless of how you do it, customer information will hang off the customer if you can get them to sign in.  If not, the billing and shipping info will sit on the transaction.

Billing and shipping info

Typically in checkout, the next step is shipping and billing.  If the customer logged in, you can automatically populate the billing and shipping info with their customer profile information.  This step may look straightforward to the user, but on the back end it is very heavy.  Once you have the customer’s address then you can check the validity of their address, calculate shipping rate, tax, recycling fee if applicable, or check the denied party list if applicable.  These are all callouts to services that take time which could cause the customer to get impatient while they wait.

• Verifying address: To process credit cards and calculate shipping charges you need a valid address.  There are services that do this through a remote API where you can send the address and get a list of matching valid addresses back.  The customer then selects the correct one and continues.
• Display shipping rate: Once you have a valid address, you can send it to a shipper to calculate the cost.  Depending on the products and location you may offer just standard shipping or expedited at an additional cost.  The weight of the products could also affect the amount so they must be sent in the request as well.
• Calculate tax: Taxes are complicated in the US.  Brazil is complicated, too.  Other parts of the world are easier with straight percentages for Goods and Service Taxes, but you must provide a tax calculation which is another service that is called.
• Non-taxable entity: In some cases, you need to allow customers to opt out of taxes because they are a non-taxable entity.  This isn’t common, but you need a way of validating the request is legitimate.
• Recycling fees: For some products, recycling fees must be collected.  Once the customer enters their address info, you will know if they reside in California or other locations that require recycling fees.
• Denied party list: Again, this is another service for sensitive equipment.  You will need to send the customer name and address out to the service that will allow or deny the purchase from continuing.  If it is denied, then the order would be routed to sales support before processing.

For business customers, you may need to add a layer of complexity to the billing and shipping addresses.  In many cases, businesses will only allow specific addresses to be shipped to and you must provide a dropdown of their locations that the purchaser can select from.  Or in other cases, the business may allow a deviation from the addresses where the customer can freely enter an address.  Regardless, serving business customers can complicate the process some.

As you can see, the customer billing and shipping might appear simple to the customer, but all the back end services complicate this step and could cause a delay.  There are techniques you can employ to minimize this delay such as submitting the requests as soon as you get the address information, but you really are at the mercy of how quickly the services can respond.

Enter payment info

Payment info is the next step.  Sequentially, payment processing is dependent on the billing address so you need to enter it prior to selecting a payment method.  Here the checks are more obvious and in the interface you can alert the customer when there might be a delay such as when you process the credit card information.

There are services to assist in credit card processing, but unfortunately when you offer international sales, you might need to employ the use of multiple services for the local flavors of payment methods.  Often in the US, we assume customers want to buy with Visa, Mastercard, AMEX, or paypal, but across the globe there are different credit card options like JCB in Japan and Boletto in Brazil that allows customers to pay over time.  If you are supporting global customers, you must be able to support the most common payment options they have.  Some flavors include credit cards, purchase order, Boletto, Cheque, PayPal, bank draft, and consumer financing.

It’s also possible to bypass all the steps above by routing to either Amazon or PayPal checkout.  This simplifies the checkout process because the customer logs into the respective service and then can take advantage of any stored information they may have with the service.

Thank You Page

The thank you page is a simple summary of what was purchased and where it is being shipped to.  It also gives you an opportunity to register the user one more time.  You already have the customer’s email and address information and can capture that in association with a new user by allowing them to enter a password.

The explanation above describes the components of checkout at a high level.  Most eCommerce systems will have support for a lot of the functionality.  However, when you delve deeper into business customer needs and international payment options you may have to integrate multiple services as no service provides coverage of all international requirements.  In a future blog post, I will discuss these complexities and different marketing options you can employ in the process.

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In consulting, we have worked with many companies that have complex product offerings.  Between us we’ve seen high tech products like computers, servers, telecom switches, cars, construction equipment, health insurance plans, and phone service plans.  What all these products have in common is that customers have difficulty making buying decisions which means companies need to make the products simpler to sell.  I’ll discuss a few techniques for doing this below at a high level and then in future posts, I’ll delve deeper into each of the approaches.

A discussion about attributes.  To make it easier to buy, complex products need sorting, categorizing, and the ability to select features.  We do this through attributes.  All products have attributes whether it is a hard drive on a computer, insurance plan deductable, or a type of bucket on construction equipment.  All of these are attributes of the product.  In the recent past, attributes were buried in verbose descriptions of the products, which then required human experts to guide buyers through product features and help them in the buying process. But today we have computers that can help us do the laborious tasks of sorting and categorizing.  Attributes help us do this by associating products with similar attributes in categories.  As discussed in the value selling blog post, you can break a product down by sellable and descriptive attributes.  This might be a hard drive as explained before or calories in a candy bar for example.  Different products will have similar sets of attributes that are placed in categories.

How do you sell them?  Once your products are fully described, it’s time to organize them for sales.  This can be done with navigable categories for straightforward products, faceted browse for more complex products, and a configurator for very complex products.  You should mix and match these techniques to fit the particular buying style of the customer.  Some customers just want to pick from a list and others like to tinker with features.

Categories.  This is the simplest selling technique you can use.  All you’re doing here is placing similar products in categories that you create.  Many companies like to categorize products by their technical attributes.  For example, computers that use a similar processor, or trucks that have a similar towing capacity, or insurance plans that have a certain deductible.  You can segment your products by these attributes and put them in categories that make sense to sell them.  When you have a limited number of products and they don’t change frequently, this is a fairly easy way to help customers sort through your products.

Faceted browsing.  As your products scale the ladder of complexity, faceted browse is the next helpful technique for selling your products.  Think of these as dynamic categories.  Rather than placing your products in categories yourself, you have your list of products described by attributes. You then establish some high level search parameters so a customer can search via the attributes to create their own categories based on what is important to them.  For example, suppose you sold computers and one of your faceted browse categories was processor.  You would have the list of processors and the customer could select them.  Faceted browse would respond by displaying all the computers with that corresponding processor.  You can get more interesting with faceted browse where you have ranges of values such as price ranges or product dimensions as long as the underlying attributes support it.

Configurator.  For the most complex products, a configurator is necessary.  Configurators allow you to specify rules between attributes for things like compatibility matrices or simply Boolean rules that dictate how attributes interact.  High tech makes heavy use of configurators allowing customers to select between processors, hard drives, optical drives, and other features ensuring the final list of selections is compatible.  Evan Amazon is delving into basic configuration with things like shirt sizes or different book formats. For Amazon, they have a list of SKUs and associated attributes.  The list of products is reduced when you make selections.  This is similar to faceted browse as it is list reduction, but presented in a different interface other than faceted browse.  More complicated products utilize rules that dictate compatibility and will display options, then reduce the options for future selections based on those rules.

What is the best technique for you?  It really depends on your product portfolio and your audience.  To those of us in the industry these concepts are second nature, but it always amazes me to see sites with complex product offerings who haven’t thought through how their customer wants to buy.  One company that comes to mind has a catalog of their products, some simple, some complex that is completely separate from their configurator.  When a customer sees a product they’d like to buy, they have to remember the features and apply them in the configurator themselves.  The customer buying experience only serves to frustrate potential customers and drive them away.

Limit facet categories.  If you don’t have products to cover all your facets, then limit your categories or opt for straight categories.  It’s a bad idea to provide a facet searching capability and then present the customer empty search results.  Make sure that your facets are driven by what you have in your catalog.  And if a certain facet category is unavailable based on previous facet selections, make sure you grey it out or remove it altogether.  If your system doesn’t prune your facets automatically based on your catalog items, you’ll have to spend time pruning facet categories yourself.

Combine your catalog and configurator.  Starting point configurations make it easier for a customer to use a configurator.  These are pre-selected configurations that customers start with when they configure a system.  The starting point configurations can be placed in catalogs or searched through faceted browse, but then configured when a customer selects them.  It just makes it easier for a customer to start with a pre-configured system rather than building everything from scratch.  It also helps with customer satisfaction because the pre-configured system is already valid and can be purchased without any changes.  As with the example explained above, the company mentioned neglected this altogether giving the customer free reign on building anything they wanted.  If you have a broad range of uses for your product, it is best to define industry specialty starting points that the customer can buy or extend.

Good, better, best.  Starting point configurations can be built in many ways.  A good way to build them is to create good, better, and best options.  Some customers automatically navigate to the value systems and some customers like to start with the high end systems.  By creating different options for starting points, you can satisfy a range of customers and help them get to their preferred configuration quicker.  When you arrange them on the screen, psychologically customers in western countries navigate to the item on the left as the ‘value’ option and the one on the right as the ‘power user’ option.

Help me decide.  Still another way of helping the customer is to provide a help me decide feature that guides the customer to their optimal products based on their preferences.  When done correctly, this can benefit the customer, but when done incorrectly it just looks like a sales technique pushing certain products.  The key with this is defining the attributes on the products that correspond to the lifestyle choices.  Too many times, companies are unwilling to extend a products attributes and try to fit the attributes they have into the lifestyle categories and it doesn’t work very well.

Natural language search.  Still another technique that is used in conjunction with faceted browse is the natural language search.  With the natural language search, customers enter words into a search field and search across all products.  The results are simply a list which can then be further refined by faceted browse.  This is a good way for a customer to find the products they want quickly.  The natural language search box should be prominently displayed on the landing page so the customer can enter the text and see results immediately.

These are just a few ways you can tweak your product selling techniques.  As mentioned before, this is simply a high level description of the tools.  In future posts, I will explore details of how we’ve approached designing and using these tools in different customer contexts.

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One of our customers initiated a new program to sell through eTailers.  As mentioned in another blog article, you have to get the product data to the eTailer, receive orders, and then foster growth.  In this article, we’ll talk about how we got product, price, and inventory information to this customer’s channel partners.

When tasked with this problem, we first went through an evaluation process, and then a vendor selection process.  Ultimately, the vendor we settled on was Akeneo.  The Akeneo platform was born out of the founder’s experience with Magento. They saw that there was complexity managing the data that went into the eCommerce system.  So, they created Akeneo to address the challenges. We’re up and running now and we are building a sustainable model for servicing the channels.  This starts with automating the process for getting product, price and inventory data to the eTailers.

Overall, Akeneo is a solid product.  It’s open source so you have access to the code to make changes and it’s pretty easy to modify.  For this customer, the high level process was straightforward:  Import products, prices, and inventory positions into system; update data; and then export in format for channel partner.

It was a little different than Akeneo’s original intention which assumed you were getting the same product data out to the omni-channels you serviced such as web, print, mobile, etc.  Our use case was different in that we were getting product data out to lots of different eTailers.  The products weren’t always the same, the descriptions weren’t always the same but could be, and the prices and inventory weren’t always the same.  So, we had to make some modifications.

The baseline Akeneo workflow provided a solid foundation of features we could build on to support the operations.  The basic premise is the same – data is imported, data is modified, and data is exported.  In the Akeneo interface, these steps are defined as Collect, Enrich, and Spread.

Collect.  The first step is to import the data.  In this case, we had a few different sources of data – all flat files – which were delivered to a secure FTP server every morning.  From there, we had different profiles of import scripts in Akeneo.  These imports are scheduled daily using the internal Akeneo cron utility.  There is some custom processing we had to do on import such as concatenating several fields together, but it was simple enough to do in PHP.  We also had to modify the import scripts to preserve manually overwritten data which we will talk about more in the Enrich step.  We added a pull from an external secure FTP site to move the files to the local server and we added a number of error conditions that are reported during import.  The scripts run daily and there is a lot of data that changes, so these additions were critical to making the process work in production.

Enrich.  Once the data is imported, we enrich it.  Akeneo’s base functionality has most of features we needed in that you can view and change product details, you can see historical changes, you can create product classes (which they call families) to determine what attributes are required, and you can categorize the products in one or more catalogs.  All necessary things for managing product data.

For us, the imported data can change frequently and we had to have a process to preserve manually overwritten data, otherwise we would have had to re-enter the manual data after every refresh.  We also wanted to utilize Akeneo’s internal history function to show when an attribute had a manual override so that a manager could go back and research who had made changes.  We accomplished this by adding additional ‘preserve’ attributes that mirrored the standard attributes and then added custom code that modified the history.

The next change we made was to modify the Available functionality.  We added a toggle on the data grid to add or remove the part from the channel and the ability to mass update the parts to toggle the Available field.  We use the attribute to indicate if the product is available in the channel and only export those parts during the export.

Next, Akeneo has global attributes and channel based attributes.  For us, we don’t always use the same data across channels, but can.  So, in the edit screens we added an ‘Apply to all channels’ button for the attributes that could.  You can modify the value, then if you want it to apply across all channels, you click the button and it copies the data.

Another feature was to only export a partial list of parts in an export profile.  Some of the channels only want net change for product descriptions, but then a full export of pricing and inventory.  So, we modified the data grid to allow us to send a partial list of exports to a selected export profile.

Finally, we added price and inventory reports that would show us prices and inventory across all channels.  We needed a single place to go to view prices and inventory across multiple channels and Akeneo does not provide that functionality in the base install.

These were all straightforward changes that we implemented in the PHP code which were done in weeks not months.

Spread.  Once the data is finalized, it has to get to several different channel partners including eTailers like eBay, Sears, and Amazon.  Each of these eTailers has their own data requirements and delivery nuances.  For example, eBay requires the data in a zipped, tab delimited file format.  They require a file for product information and a separate one for price and inventory updates.  For automated updates, Sears requires the data in an XML format and sent via an HTTP API.  To complicate things further, some vendors require minimum or maximum characters on different fields.  All of this is handled by the export process.

Akeneo has export profiles which we use for all the different file formats.  Each channel partners has one or more export formats that mirror the files they require.  For example, eBay has two export profiles – one for product data and a separate one for price and inventory data.  We took the process a step further and added ‘delivery’ functionality.  Once the data is exported, it is then packaged for delivery to the respective channel.  In the case of eBay, the files are zipped and then ftped to the eBay servers which are automatically imported at a specified time interval.

Summary.  All in all, Akeneo provided a solid base from which we expanded the functionality for our specific needs.  The tried and true technology stack of PHP and MySQL, while might not be the most exciting technology, is very mature and easy to change.  We made the mistake of chasing new technologies initially and it bit us in the wallet.  It was much more expensive than it needed to be, was difficult to modify, and difficult to find people that knew the technology stack.  Akeneo was much quicker –from start to finish took 3 months – and we’re on to the next step of helping them increase sales in these channels.

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In eComm when you fulfill products, you have a few choices.  You can build to order, ship from inventory, or have partially built products that you finish and ship when ordered.  Depending on your products and customers, you may have a mix of these different models.

I’ve written a few posts about pricing and products, but our experience really extends to all aspects of the sales process. We have worked with several Fortune 100 companies and recognize that in a product company, you know your offering is more than simply a product. Your offering is the intersection of product, price, and availability. You interest your buyers with the product, price drives their decision process, and when they can get it finalizes the decision.

Availability and eComm.  By combining product customization, dynamic pricing and availability on a website, you will give customers the tools they need to make the trade-offs between a specific product configuration and speed of delivery.  Some customers want a specific model and others want it now.  The flexibility of having inventory coupled with build to order gives your customer this option.  From an eComm perspective, you need to provide this information in a way that is useful for your customers which will  help your sales effort.

Display availability prominently.  On the site, when the customer can get the product should be displayed prominently.  As they’re browsing, they should be able to see the product ships in 2-3 days or 3 weeks or whatever your lead time is.  As mentioned when customers are making decisions about products, availability can be a trade-off that the customer bases a decision on.  It isn’t always the guiding decision for all customers, but plays a part.

Guide customers to inventory.  In a previous post, I discussed how you could use good, better, best products to guide the customer into a starting point configuration.  The interesting thing about it is that when you provide these options, some segment of your consumers will simply buy these products outright.  This can help you plan inventory given that you know you will sell some percentage of these products.  You can pre-produce these products and put them in inventory for quick shipment.  One way to guide customers is to offer special discounts on inventory products that aren’t valid on configured systems.

Build to order.  The higher end products are more specialized and customers understand that it takes longer to get.  Once they get off a standard model and start customizing it, the changing lead time should be displayed.  These high end products are typically higher margin, too, so by providing quick ship lower end models coupled with build to order custom models helps you maximize your profit.  You might even want to minimize upgrades on lower end models and allow more upgrades on higher end products.

How do you help planning from eComm?  Displaying the data on an eComm site is the first step.  The second step is fulfilling the product.  This requires solid planning which is beyond the scope of this post.  There are some guiding principles you can use from the sales side, though to help the planners do their job more easily.

Quick ship.  For products you’re going to ship quickly, it’s really best to have local inventory.  This is easier said than done.  As mentioned before, when products are displayed prominently on the website, it is more likely that the customer will buy them.  So, some percentage of customers will buy those products and you need inventory for them.  Planning this requires a synchronization between analysis of what configurations people have bought in the past coupled with an educated guess on what your future inventory needs will be based on your promotion calendar.  There are lots of software products that can help plan this on the market and it needs to be right.  I used to work with car companies and they were notorious for forecasting black exterior / black interior cars and forcing dealers in Texas to buy them to get the trucks they wanted.  The cars didn’t sell and dealers would have to discount them steeply to get rid of them, then the forecasters would assume they sold well because people bought them.  It was a vicious cycle.

Configure to availability.  This was always the gold standard of customer satisfaction.  Give the customer ultimate flexibility in selecting your product options and then build it to order when they configure it.  Realistically, you can’t warehouse all the permutations of configurations you can build.  But you can direct the customer to common configurations with shorter lead times and offer more demanding customers the options they want at a longer lead time.  Years ago, we did a project with a construction equipment manufacturer where the customer could configure the product and in real-time the planning tool would slot the configurations in the factory to tell the customer how long it would take to get the product.  It was awesome!  But the simple truth was that, while technically feasible, when you’re talking about a lead time longer than a week then the customer doesn’t need an exact delivery date.  So, lead times on parts are really sufficient.  When you’re doing configure to availability, the simplest way to provide the data is to have lead time on each of the components then display the longest one to the customer.  If you can display the lead time per component next to the price in a configurator, that always helps a customer make decisions.

Simulating configure to availability.  Also known as re-configuration, this is also easier said than done and no one does it very well.  Car dealers do this all the time by offering locally installed options such as sunroofs or other packages, but the sales rep typically has to offer the option to the customer rather than an eComm site.  In the computer industry, you can re-configure a lot of options on desktops, but laptops are harder.  With laptops you can swap out memory easily and a larger hard drive can be installed then re-imaged, but other options are more difficult.  As mentioned in a previous post, upgrades help increase profit and if retailers or warehouses would figure out how to do this efficiently, they’d be able to increase their profit.  I bet Amazon will figure it out one day and then everyone else will follow their lead!

Notify your planners of promotions.  I know it sounds obvious, but we’ve seen many times when price discounts are not coordinated with fulfillment.  Fulfillment finds out when product suddenly starts running out of stock in the middle of what should be a big sale.

All of this assumes you have a decent handle on your inventory and planning process.  Without that, none of this will work.  Customers don’t appreciate being told they can get a product by a given date and then it doesn’t show up and there’s no notification.  On eBay in particular, if you violate your service level you get a lower seller rating which will definitely affect your sales!  As explained, your offering is the intersection between product, price and availability.  The balancing act of pre-configured machines to build to order is a challenge, but when you do it right you can really maximize your profit.

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Some would argue that getting structured product data right in eCommerce is as critical as getting pricing correct.  Product data tells the customer what they are buying and entices them to spend more money on upgrades or accessories.  When product data is wrong, customers might overlook a product or request a refund when the product isn’t what you said it was.  This is opportunity lost and a customer service issue.  Both ding profit.

Our experience is with more complicated products that have multiple layers of components, but these processes exist in any company that has a large number of products.  For simplicity sake, we will frame the discussion around the following categories of data and where the breakdowns occur in getting the structured content out to your eCommerce site:

• Manufacturing data – manufacturing data is used to identify parts from an internal perspective. This data is technical in nature and typically errors in formatting or grammar are acceptable because the product data is for an internal audience.
• Marketing data –manufacturing data is used as a baseline for marketing content to ensure the technical representation of the data is accurate, but in many cases the data is re-written with a marketing bent.
• Channel data – your channel partners may require data to be presented in a specific way or described differently than marketing data.
• Other audiences – of course there are other internal audiences that need the data in various business functions such as accounting and inventory management, but we are restricting the discussion to eCommerce here.

In most organizations, since different types of data have different audiences, they often reside in different systems.  This means the data needs to be transferred from one system to the next, enhanced, then marches further upstream until it reaches the desired audience.

Breakdowns occur when transferring data from manufacturing to marketing.  Manufacturing data is usually stored in a PLM system where the products are defined.  Marketing data is typically authored in an eCommerce system or even CRM.  Many times there is an ERP system in between each system and the data is structured differently.  This means a translation must occur from one system to the next which could be done in an MDM system or an equivalent data aggregation and distribution tool.  If all the data was perfect, this is still a lot of moving parts to coordinate to keep data integrity.  Now, throw in the fact that a lot of times liberties are taken in defining the data such as certain fields are overloaded with text meant for a downstream system.  It makes it almost impossible to trace data back to its source when issues occur, so many times downstream authors decide to re-write the content rather than fix the upstream issues.

Re-authoring content for marketing is a commonly used to solving data issues.  Marketing folks are re-writing data regardless because the audience is different for their content consumers.  But often, re-authoring is used to fix data rather than re-audience it.  This is a bad practice, but exacerbating the problem is the fact that the systems typically mirror organizational structures as well and the different authors operate in silos.  The organizational impedance is too great to overcome and authors will just re-write it for their own context.  This means that the data is still wrong for the original author’s audience and if the data was ever changed in the original source, then none of those changes would be reflected downstream.

Codifying rules for data manipulation is the third area where problems occur.  As mentioned, upstream users may employ tactics to send signals to downstream systems like overloading text fields or appending text to the front of names.  One of our customers used a price of $99999 to signify that the part was disabled.  There were no input rules around it, so untrained users thought that any number over $99999 would work or that $999999 would work which wasn’t the case.  The MDM system had been coded to recognize exactly $99999 and nothing else.  Hundreds of such rules can exist in a large scale deployment.

All of these complications lead to errors on the eCommerce site and sometimes these errors are costly.  One customer we worked with left a component off the description of their product which lead the pricer to discount the product and then they shipped 50 free optical drives for free!  In another case, an inferior product was labeled with high end components but priced compatible with the lower end product.  Customers purchased the product and received the inferior product.  Customer service reps dealt with the issue for the next two weeks costing the company money for each return.

There’s no silver bullet for solving these issues.  The inconvenient truth about data production is that it is complicated when you are doing it on a large scale.  The lynchpin is twofold:  solid processes for addressing data issues and secondly a holistic MDM system  that is capable of pulling in data from many different sources and then using business rules to transform the data into many different formats needed by the downstream systems.  Without these two things you’re going to be chasing your tail tracking down various flat files and reports, importing them into too many independent systems.  So what do you need to reduce errors in the process?

• A solid MDM system that is capable of pulling in data from many different sources and then transforming it to the format you need for your eCommerce system
• The next thing that’s needed is a hierarchical representation of data in the eCommerce system set up so that the manufacturing data is at the lowest level, then eCommerce, then Channel.  This ensures that when new technical data comes in, it doesn’t overwrite what you have and you can use the data if you want to.
• A good process for identifying errors in data and then getting it corrected in any of the failure points. This cannot be underestimated and no system is going to do it for you.

We’ve been able to do this with a number of customers, but like I said, it’s not easy.  Only blood, sweat and tears will get you through it.  But once you’ve corrected the failure points, you’ll see harmony descend on the process and your data quality will go up resulting in improved profits.

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