Gartner is already working on a consolidated response to this event. However for the e-commerce market this is an interesting event from two points of view.

The first one is that two e-commerce Magic Quadrant vendors are consolidating into one (IBM a leader and Sterling Commerce a Challenger). Provided the deal closes without any interference, this event could signal other acquisitions of smaller e-commerce vendors by larger vendors. I believe that these acquisitions will seek to take advantage of the growing e-commerce market as organizations make investments in the web sales capabilities.

Secondarily, the e-commerce market is evolving and this evolution is well beyond those changes driven by a desire for new user experiences such as social software and mobile (more research on this coming out soon). This evolution includes much more than business-to-consumer functionality; it includes global business-to-business e-commerce with industries such as manufacturing, distribution and telecommunications seeking to improve their online self-service sales capabilities. This is where this deal will be one to watch in 2010 and beyond.

Can we see another Dot.com 2.0 with plenty of e-commerce announcements in 2010 and beyond? Yes! We still have Internet Retailer and our Gartner CRM Summit events in June. So stay tuned.

An interesting story on a court ruling that enabled students to rate teachers sparked an equally interest discuss discussion around reviewing people performance.

As the e-commerce person here, I have been talking with clients about product rating for years. It has been my belief that with all product review ratings the reader should apply the “grain of salt theory”.

Ratings or reviews are only part of the customer (in the case parents and students) evolution process and are subject to gaming by many parties.

Moreover, one rating alone does not tell the whole story; have you gone to move just because it says “Excellent Movie…” NY Times on the poster – Most likely not.

However as the producer of a product or service once should be aware that people has a public forum to use and that anyone with an opinion can shout it out on the internet. Even if that person never even used the product or service, they may just not like the company for instance. Therefore, I thought I would list some attributes that bring value to ratings.

• Depth – How detailed is the rating? – Only the word “great” or did the writer provide information on their position?
• Number- How many are there only one or thousands?
• Timeliness or the rating – Are the ratings current or three years old?
• The profile of the rater – Do they do many ratings on these types of products or services? Are they an avid user of these types of products or services? Simple things like are the male or female can also help, for example male skiers will rate ski’s differently than female skiers, also rating can vary by age of the reviewer.
• Belief in the rating quality – Ever read a rating the looks like the product manufacturer wrote?

Therefore, product reviews are only a guideline they are not law and with all things – “Caveat emptor”.

An interesting phenomenon that I am seeing is that a company can go bankrupt and yet its online store can outlive the physical business. Take for example Linen – N – Things (www.lnt.com) and Circuit City (http://www.circuitcity.com/) both who filed for bankruptcy and closed their stores in 2009 have new owners of their website operations. (See http://www.circuitcity.com/sectors/opt-outv2.asp and http://www.lnt.com/content/6/help-faqs.html for the stories on the new owners.) I believe this trend confirms that your organizations website is the primary face of the organization and the customers can become loyal to your online operations. Moreover, it is possible for these online businesses either to remain as pure play online retailers or to resurrect their stores when the economy picks up.

I know this may seem like I am reaching here. However why else would the online sites survive the demise of the business? In addition, I cannot help to point out that the Linens – N- Things site still has a store locator on the homepage and when you click on the store locator, you will find a statement that Linens – N -Things is “presently” an online only store.

Now the next challenge for these businesses is to provide a superior online customer experience that makes customers want to come back for more. So as I see it, the bottom line here is make sure you website customer experience can interoperate with your stores for sales, service and marketing or else it may be the only thing left in the end.

Ok, I have been swamped with client inquiries, research and the upcoming Internet Retailer Conference (Come to my session if you are there it will be quite interesting. http://www.internetretailer.com/IRCE2009/session_detail.asp?sess_id=76 ). Anyway, I was up late last night planning my much-needed vacation and being a web person I used an online booking service that I have used in the past. Well, I booked a room that according to the information on the website would fit my family and me. Well when I received the conformation email, something in the email did not look right about the type of room reserved. For that reason, I called an agent, the agent confirmed that I had booked a smaller type of room that would not accommodate my family, and she pointed out some other items that were not offered at the resort. Well after speaking with her, I spent $10 more to book my stay but the agent canceled my web order and reserved me the proper accommodations at different resort in the same location for the same time. Consequently, for $10 more I avoided walking into the wrong room type and accommodations all because the agent had better information than the web site. Ever wonder if your site has the same problem?

However, in the examples used in these discussions Amazon’s perceived image is different to each person. So as beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Amazon’s business model is in the eyes of the user. For example, if I asked you to complete this question Amazon is…

What would be your answer?

Here are some of the ones I hear.

• An online mall where it enables vendors to sell within the Amazon experience
• A retailer where they sell goods they stock and ship
• A brand  in itself representing the bench mark for online shopping (from product research to purchase)
• A destination site (start all your shopping here)
• A technology provider of cloud computing?
• A technology provider that can run your online store for you

However, one of my most popular inquiry questions I receive is “How do we create a customer experience like Amazon?”

Well the answer to the second questions lies in the first. What do you think Amazon is?

Instead, All but two of the replies were within each persons “home” community, now this test may not have followed the rules of scientific testing but it still pointed out to me that people have an affinity to stay “home” online.

So can this mean that organizations seeking to create their own communities instead of taking part in existing ones are going to fail? Alternatively, do they need offer a clear value proposition, purpose and benefit to the user to draw them into the organization’s community? What is your view?

I go to the site register my products and next I have to go through a process that makes tax forms look like fun. I have to have the site scan for my device after the request to hook it up, however they already know what I have since I registered the products and they are in the “My Products” tab of my account.

After waiting for the device check, two maps set are recommended so I pick one and to make sure I have the right maps I read all the tabs and find out the first recommended product does not support by my devices. I hit the back button and repeat the process for the next product and find it supports my devices. Next, I put the product in the cart and proceed to checkout (30 minutes at this point).

During the check out process I notice that the 10% discount that I was told I would get for registering my product isn’t apply and that I need a code that I did see or was not told to save for my purchases. Now I have to restart the process to see if I can find the code for the discount (at this point I feel like Frodo in Lord of the Rings).  I can’t find the code so now I go through the whole process again to purchase what I need (swearing that when the devices I own die that I will buy the competitors products sight unseen) after paying 10% more than I had too and then being charged for shipping.

Imagine what sales could be like if this was the process – sign into your account, select your devices from the “My Products” tab that has a link that reads “update maps” suggest the right product from the beginning and automatically apply the unclaimed discount to the cart and take me to check with address information pre-loaded from my account (remember I registered) and take me to check out – time should be <5 minutes to do this. Also why do you need my phone number plan on calling me soon? Also, if you wonder did I try calling the number on the site, I did they were closed.)  So is your site shopping process like this one? Send me your URL if you feel up to the challenge.

This little scout and her dad like any good renegade salesperson didn’t wait for her organization to give her the go ahead to use the web. Instead, she just did it.

Now the fun part is that the local council asked her to take down the online order form like any larger organization would try to shut down a renegade practice (e.g., Don’t expense your cell phone, or SFA tool that you got on your own). However, this in turn put the practice in the national spotlight which from a marketing prospective is a big bang for very little bucks. (It sure made me want the cookies.)

Now where else have we seen this before? Remember when your web site was a back room operation or maybe your company is experimenting with social software like facebook and YouTube. Do you think your organizations is like the Girl Scouts where innovation at a grassroots level is stopped or are you free to try something new?

Well I finally got my new laptop after my old one died, so I’m back to trying to catch up with everything including my blogging.

I know we all have been hearing about the slow holiday sales but I couldn’t help think that there are shoppers out there using their smart phones for price checking. Whether it is using your G1 to scan an UPC code and look it up on Google or pinging a web site via your phone browser, I believe this year we will see that consumers will have used their phones to check prices and product reviews as part of their overall decision process. So has anyone reading this blog done this already? Did you double check a price? Did you look up product reviews before buying? Or did you even end up buying online because you phone helped you find a better deal? Activities like these will take us into a whole new world of e-commerce in which the smart phone enables organizations to reach consumers in context of their shopping. In fact you may want to read my note on the topic. Important First Steps to Context-Aware E-Commerce (G00160334), 07-OCT-2008