Google Commerce Search: New Trend for Retailers for the Festive Season?

Google unveiled on Wednesday its Commerce Search Partner Program, designed to market and implement mobile e-commerce sites. The system integrators participating in the program will anchor the implementations with Google's Commerce Search, a cloud-hosted application that retailers buy to power the search engine of their e-commerce sites.

Google states that, "We wanted to make it easier for retailers to adopt Google Commerce Search to help them achieve amazing results and meet their customers’ needs. Through this new program, resellers can work with us to bring the unique capabilities of Google Commerce Search to their retail clients." Branding Brand has worked with Timberland and earlier this year GNC to turn their mobile visions into reality. Before GNC optimized their mobile website, 10 to 15 percent of their e-commerce traffic came from mobile. Since launching it this summer, there are twice as many visitors using search, and mobile search conversions are up 50 percent.

Google claims that, their newest customer, Timberland, just went live with their mobile-optimized website powered by Google Commerce Search in a matter of days. Chris Hardisty, director of Timberland Global E-Commerce, says: “Our first priority in developing our mobile website was making sure customers had the best experience possible. Shoppers today expect fast and relevant results especially on mobile, where speed and interactivity matter most. Since we launched our mobile-optimized website, we have seen mobile sales grow 20 times faster than our desktop site sales.”

Price match or refund at checkout! Now that's a bold a move

Sainsbury's is launching a hi-tech promotion scheme in which price match for shopping basket will be done at the checkout. If any difference found with other retailers such as Tesco or Asda the amount will be refunded in vouchers. This scheme is set to unleash an unprecedented supermarket price war.

Tesco has already said that it will accept the Sainsbury's vouchers while Asda is believed to be responding by installing booths with internet links so customers can check its online price guarantee. It already has a price guarantee scheme which shoppers can access from home.

The store is piloting this on Brand Match till technology.

Retail and Financial Services - Two Sectors Getting Ever Closer

Who handles bulk of the Cash on UK High Street? Who manages bulk of the financial transactions going through the ever-growing ECommerce industry? As you would have guessed the answer is not Banks and Financial institutions, the answer is Retailers. Put all together, the retail operators handle more cash as well as card transaction on the UK High Street as well as in the ECommerce world. And there are indications that, retailers will be making most of this strength and make further inroads in offering financial services. 

The banking arm of the Co-operative Group will today offer everyday-banking services from an additional 250 high street branches as it completes the integration of Britannia.

Building Society.Britannia's branches have previously been used only for Britannia savings accounts but from this week they will be able to carry out everyday current account work for all Co-op customers. In addition, the Co-operative Financial Services will now be known as The Co-operative Banking Group and will operate under both The Co-operative Bank and The Co-operative Insurance brand names.

Unnoticed by many, Tesco recently bought out the banking partner that supplied the back-office skills for its limited range of financial services. That is as big a hint as you could get that it is planning to expand.But it does so with the huge advantage of Tesco Clubcard data, through which it knows almost everything there is to know about its customers' spending habits. This will give Tesco a huge insight into what it can afford to save and to borrow. 

Trends which are developing for the past few years and to watch out for;

• Customer Loyalty Programs collaborating closely with Retail Transactions to monitor and make sense of Consumer buying patterns
• Customer Relationship Programs leveraging Financial offers (cards, loans, etc)
• Third party promotions and alliances. A good example is Boots - Waitrose linkage
• Retailers using established banks to offer white label financial products. Number of retailers now offer store cards which are in turn products from financial services firms such as MBNA.
• Retailers with large enough scale launching their own financial services. A good example if Tesco Bank.
• Large retailers eventually buying small to medium financial services firm 

With Banks and Financial institutions coming under more pressure from regulatory authorities and adverse trading conditions we can only anticipate these trends gaining further momentum in coming months and quarters.

Tesco pulls out of Japan

After ploughing more than £250m and eight years into trying to crack one of the toughest retail markets in the world, Tesco has admitted defeat and announced that it is pulling out of Japan. The move is a rare admission of defeat by the British supermarket group and raised speculation it could be prepared to exit its much larger loss-making business in the United States if its current recovery plan fails to deliver. 

As Reuters reports, Japan is the smallest of Tesco's 13 international businesses, consisting of 129 stores in greater Tokyo employing just over 3,900 people and making less than 500 million pounds ($813.8 million) in annual sales, according to analysts' estimates. Analysts had long tipped the business for disposal after it failed to make significant inroads into a market dominated by general merchandise operators such as Seven & I Holdings and Aeon . 

But Philip Clarke, the chief executive of Tesco, tried to quash any speculation that the grocer may also seek to pull the plug on its Fresh & Easy chain in the US, which suffered losses of £186m in the year to 26 February. Tesco – which has operations in 14 countries, including Japan and the UK – has vowed to make Fresh & Easy profitable by the end of 2012-13. Mr Clarke said yesterday: "We've got great opportunities in Asia in businesses where we are market-leading and I think any comparison with Fresh & Easy would be inappropriate."

Accelarating cloud based ECommerce Apps, now made easy?

If you are a web based business such as an e-retailer hosting your business with Amazon cloud infrastructure, you may be in for a pleasant surprise. Amazon has just announced in-memory caching feature on its cloud services which will enable transactions such as e-retailing to go faster.

ElastiCache, announced on Monday, is software for caching frequently accessed pieces of data 'in-memory' — or in RAM — within the cloud. This speeds response times when querying sprawling databases or running complex calculations, and so should help companies to increase the responsiveness of applications on their websites, according to Amazon.

"Caching has become a standard component in many applications to achieve a fast and predictable performance, but maintaining a collection of cache servers in a reliable and scalable manner is not a simple task," AWS's chief technology officer Werner Vogels wrote in a blog post on Monday.

Traditionally ecommerce or web apps have relied on caching in middleware technologies to achieve similar outcome but often this an expensive undertaking given depedency on expensive software licences and niche skills of finetuning middleware software. If its claims are true, Amazon will make this in-memory caching to boost apps response speed relatively easier to achive.

"Cloud like" infrastructures make sense for large retailers

The bigger the IT landscape the less attractive the business case for shift to cloud computing. Well, you end up with a very large private cloud as economy of scale wipes benefits of public cloud. The argument will probably hold true in large number of cases. Though i can imagine large airlines leveraging public cloud as most common airline processes are interlinked or are shared with a few other airlines. (oh that's Amadeues for you!) i was thinking about this in the context of large retailers. If you are a large retailer like Tesco surely it's scale, growth plans and operational justify your own infrastructure? I was also thinking of this in context of news that Tesco has signed a eight-year deal to use Microsoft products and services. I wondered how much of it would be cloud based and would Microsoft's latest cloud offerings be leveraged in this deal.

"Cloud like" characteristics will certainly be most desirable, no doubt. Any business operation will demand agile, flexible, less capital intensive investment in it's infrastructure. But i am wondering if commercial constructs of such deals can be made to mirror that of "cloud like" contract?

When it comes to E-Retailing is Small the new beautiful?

Just came across the news of BigCommerce raising $15 million and I was wondering when it comes to dynamic growth are retailers better off looking at "small is beautiful" business model?

Launched in 2009, BigCommerce provides a comprehensive SaaS for retailers and merchants to manage e-commerce online. BigCommerce helps small businesses power anything and everything related to an online storefront from search to inventory to online payments to marketing and SEO. And the price for the software is affordable for small businesses, with basic plans starting at $25 per month. The company has $200 million in total transactions via its SaaS and is adding 1,000 clients per month. Sounds like a good growth pattern to me!

Amazon EC2 is clearly growing backing on the same trend. The business model is simple, attract small start ups, low capital investments, pay as you go, adopt social media friendly tools to expand the reach. The issues may arise when business hits medium size growth challenges. But till then, welcome to dynamic growth!