With 15 years of E-Business experience at dmc, the company I joined earlier in 2009 has seen quite a number of trends and hypes come and go. We have helped our clients implement some of the more successful ones and quite a few of our ideas have become E-Commerce best practices and innovative approaches to Travel-Commerce. We are looking forward to 2010 for more to come.
Here is my list of topics that we will be putting special attention on:

• Multi-Channel: Most retailers will continue to leverage a hybrid approach with a focus on E-Commerce but including offline and mail order channels in 2010. True Multi-Channel retail and travel solutions however leverage web technology to process customer, product and order/shipment data across multiple channels and devices to turn their various channels into a single, customer-focused retailing environment. This includes the mobile supported transition from online to offline mode and the support of online research for offline purchase (see also the ROPO study by TUI, Google et al.), and a thorough integration with order management, the right E-Enabled and E-Enabeling ERP solution and Multi-Channel Content and PIM solutions and processes.
• Social commerce and Off-Site-Focus for relevant user participation: After experimenting with several web 2.0 approaches, brands and retailers focus more and more on relevant participation of the users into the entire supply chain. Those interactions can happen on-site but most of them happen or at least will be triggered off-site – where the users are.
• Usability and Design: With more and more e-commerce features becoming a standard for any given shop, the main differentiation available is through products and content of course, but the usability and design of a storefront are definitely the right additional aspect to focus on.
• Shop-Platforms: Whilst some retailers, especially the online pure plays rightly consider their shop platform a major differentiating asset and thus prefer a bespoke solution (mainly for individual innovation/differentiation and control), more and more focus is on the marketing and merchandising side of things assuming all shop commodities being available out of the box or custom of the shelf (focus on time 2 market and cost). On demand shops like demandware, hosted solutions built on IBM Websphere Commerce or Intershop Enfinity and custom solutions based on the typo3 based dmc mb3p platform have proven to be valid technology foundations for the different models. Other shopping cart technologies like Magento or Oxid eSales will continue to gain attention but the service provider landscape for those newcomers still needs to mature. The right levels of ability to attract and convert, feature versatility, scalability and performance at a controllable TCO will continue to depend on the right combination and balance of business model, service provider and technology approach. Through our 15 years of experience in E-Commerce we have developed and refined the means to get this equation right for you.
• Internationalization: True E-Business happens on a global level and more and more brands and retailers pursue a global approach with storefronts for individual countries and languages and custom distribution setups. At dmc we have helped numerous customers to set up international E-Businesses including E-Commerce solutions and Travel-Commerce portals by developing and executing multi-year roadmaps. Our services include E-Consulting, E-Branding, E-Technology and E-Services for international E-Businesses.

Happy 2010 and all the best for your ventures and businesses!

Payvment is a US based startup with an online shopping cart offering as a webservice. They makes use of PayPal’s new Adaptive Payments API, which was developed in an effort to compete with Amazon’s Flexible Payments API. PayPal’s API gives developers, and Payvment in this case, full access to PayPal’s features, allowing them a lot more freedom in building applications, which includes the ability to accept and distribute payments. So now, with Payvment’s Facebook app, anyone can open up a retail storefront on Facebook.

Payvment’s network character disconnects the shopping cart from the store, just like in a store in store concept. Just keep shopping through different stores and put stuff in your cart. In other words, Payvment creates a unified shopping cart across Facebook for buyers. Standalone sites who want to use Payvment’s shopping cart experience can also implement Facebook Connect, to let consumers access their personal shopping cart from Facebook.

The Payvment technology is offered as a free web service. The only costs incurred are the PayPal fees for the user. According to Facebook and this screenshot, the solution should be available outside the US soon.

Publishers who distribute content, media and applications on the web want to understand how, where and by whom their assets are being consumed. This is a question very often answered by Google Analytics, a tool based on JavaScript and Cockies to track user behavior on the web that comes bundled with a nice analytics service and reporting engine to draw conclusions out of the collected data. Some people argue that the analytics are not all actionable or do not lead to any actions, but Google is the most popular today – by far.

With the mobile web finally becoming a reality thanks to the iPhone, the distribution channels of digital assets to consumers today include not only mobile sites but more and more also mobile applications and especially iPhone applications. For the consumer the difference between the two is small and sometimes even not noticed, but for distributors of content moving to iPhone applications is quite a change when it comes to analytics. For websites optimized to show on the iPhones web browser one can rely on the same tracking and analytics functionality from Google. But iPhone applications are not supported.

Quite early in time, Pinch Media started providing an analytics library and service very similar to Google Analytics that can be used for user tracking in iPhone applications.

Pinch Analytics is software that collects anonymous usage data from mobile phone applications, and presents it in aggregated form. <..> Using Pinch Analytics will provide you with information about how your application is being used, which you can then use to improve and enhance it.

So Pinch Media is really a Google Analytics for the iPhone and they also track the same type of data. But also since the revelation of the Palm Pre collecting user data and constantly updating the vendor about them, the community seems to see this differently. The current conversation considers tracking user behavior in iPhone apps spying on them and using their bandwidth for the tracked data stealing from them. Two of the differences are an assumed less anonymous character of a device id of the iPhone over an IP address and the higher accuracy of a geo location based on real latitude and longitude and not just the location of your provider IP location.

The German newspaper Die Zeit also considers Pinch Media spyware and suggests a firewall for the iPhone. At least the blocking part of such a firewall is now available to users of cracked iPhones through Jay Freeman’s privaCy tool.

Pinch Media have in the mean time reacted and now also offer a version of their tool with an extended option for users to opt-out of the user tracking. And this requires the developers to update the existing iPhone apps.

I am sure a lot of developers will update their apps and carefully consider whether to use analytics libraries or not in the future. The is in line with the typical patterns of the consumerized mobile and web business and this is good. But I do not like the term spyware. Wikipedia says about Spyware:

Spyware is known to change computer settings, resulting in slow connection speeds, different home pages, and/or loss of Internet or functionality of other programs.

Pinch media is able to derive relevant conclusions out of their intelligence that do not harm the user but help the developer of the application.

An approach I really like is the one of Twitterfon. They have a free and a commercial version of their app and for the free one they expect their users to agree to sharing some of their data. Get something for free but give something back that does not cost you anything that can be valuable for the vendor.

What do you think?

Online social media, meaning social networking and all 2.0 style platforms following the principles of the architecture of participation are growing rapidly and get a ton of interest across industries. The understanding is, that these compelling interaction communities are the new access to consumer behavior and thus need to be leveraged for marketing and sales to outperform the competition. Harris Interactive has done a poll earlier this month to address the question whether Online Social Media really leverage behavior or they just act as communication enablers:

When it comes to making purchase decisions, consumers obtain information using a mixture of old media and new media and those that would constitute “push” (advertising and websites) and “pull” (information from neutral, informal communication).

These are some of the results of The Harris Poll of 2,355 U.S. adults surveyed online between March 9 and 16, 2009 by Harris Interactive.

The most frequently identified methods of gathering information were:

• Using a company website (36%),
• Face-to-face with a salesperson or other company representative (22%), and
• Face-to-face with a person not associated with the company (21%).

Other frequently mentioned methods or sources were:

• Advertising in print media (19%),
• Independent websites that have reviews (19%),
• Phone call to the company (16%), and
• Public or private social networking sites (4%).

See the report here: http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/pubs/Harris_Poll_2009_06_15.pdf

The poll results are really quite interesting. But I am missing the demand and lead generation role of Online Social Media and their impact on the overall marketing and sales funnel. Obviously people do not go on Facebook to find the right brand to choose for their new car, but I’m quite sure that conversations on social media sites generate a lot of demand and leads that then later enter into the controlled and monitored sales process through one of the above mentioned channels.

At Optaros, most retailers are asking us the following question:

“We’ve done product ratings and reviews, what social shopping features should we implement in 2009?”

The 2009 Social E-Commerce Guide answers the question:

• Suggested approach to plan for 2009
• 32 different options to consider with links to example websites
• Options categorized by adoption rate among retailers

Get it here.

We announced today the design and assembly of a new online shopping concept for Wonderbox, a leading international Internet and retail company that sells the “Wonderbox”, which is a themed gift box containing vouchers for 6000 experiences from which the recipient can choose. We redesigned and re-platformed Wonderbox’s online store, creating a Web 2.0 experience that drives excitement, usability and conversion rates.

Innovation is exploding in e-commerce as the industry reaches the end of its first decade. New online shopping experiences, including Wonderbox’s unique retailing concept, are proving to be successful and making legacy storefronts appear old and tired. Wonderbox sells experiences in a box through a large network of partners and distributors, including Thomas Cook, Virgin and Cultura. Since its launch in 2004, Wonderbox continues to increase its influence in the rapidly growing e-commerce retail industry, boosting its sales.

• Read the full press release on Business Wire.
• Check out our Wonderbox online case study and video walk through on optaros.com.