An increasing number of American online-retailers puts its application programming interfaces (API) open for external developers.

According to Sucharita Mulpuru, who takes care of the developments in the American e commerce line, on behalf of Forrester research, sharing APIs could very well be ‘the next big thing’. ‘It absolutely makes sense to discover this. As long as you are careful in the way developers obtain access to your data, there is no backside.’

Products move
Also Gene Alvarez of consultancy Gartner expects that API (Wikipedia: ‘A collection definitions on basis of which a computer programme can communicate with a another programme or part’) will more and more often be opened. ‘In three yearstime,  25 up to 30 percent of large online-retailers will be using it. External developers can help their products, as it were, move over the Internet.

Netflix, Etsy and Amazon
Well known companies which already use  APIs to boost their online-sales are dvd-leasing companies Netflix and Etsy.com, a marketplace for hand-made goods. Also Amazon.com makes product data available by means of its Associates web service, with which the company lets others advertises for its products.

Best Buy
With its Remix-programma, Best  Buy is of the first, in relation to sharing product data. Recently the electronics chain launched a test version of its site consumersprice.com,  where shoppers can ask price alert. By means of API’ s , the site is linked to, among others, Google Maps, Twitter and Flickr.

Recently, Clo Willaert , our belgian queen of the blog & organiser of the  Girl Geek Dinner group , invited 40 bloggers for a special day event in London. I was honoured to be part of this community beeing able to test a new ground-breaking application for smart phones using Flickr to share photos &  Twitter for tips messages. The idea is to be able to follow and contact each other in real time during a Shopping day in London.

Eurostar brought us to London for an exclusive shopping hunt and gave us a number of great advantages. In more than 9 shops in Regent Street, we enjoyed discounts and whole bunch of other advantages : a glass of Champagne in the Swarovski Crystallized Lounge, …

We also followed an unique presentation in the Apple Store. Molly Flat, female blogger for the Guardian and Jess Greenwood of Contagious Magazine, gave us an overview of the top 10 trends of 2009.

As you can see here, this great application contains an interactive map of London where you can see all the participating shops and the precise position of all the 40 bloggers. We can also post messages and pictures with the application and automatically exchange them with the others!

Just listen to an interview about what a Girl Geek really is here:

And now back to online shopping!

Tagged: Eurostar, Girl Geek Dinner, London, Shopping ]]> http://cmoitier.wordpress.com/2009/04/10/shop-and-blog-till-you-drop-ggsl-london/feed/ 1 cmoitier map http://cmoitier.wordpress.com/2009/03/04/198/ http://cmoitier.wordpress.com/2009/03/04/198/#comments Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:05:47 +0000 cmoitier http://cmoitier.wordpress.com/?p=198 ]]>

With more than one in two UK consumers shopping online today — that is about 28 million consumers — online shopping and travel booking are mainstream. UK online shoppers outspend their European and even their American counterparts. Despite the current recession, we expect online retail and travel sales in the UK to continue growing strongly over the next six years as consumers move their spending online. By 2014, 37 million UK online buyers will spend £56 billion online predicts Forrester.

Tesco, UK’s biggest food retailer, is present in 13 countries employing 400.000 people. Today 1 out of 8£ spent in the UK is spent at Tesco. Tesco.com was launched in 1996 & is now the world’s biggest online food retailer pushing the key core values “convenience & trust” offering “unbeatable value to our customers”. Online is simply another channel time saving compared to the store. People order every week 40 to 60 items and placing such order should take less than 15 minutes.

Nick Lansley, Manager IT R&D projects at Tesco.com illustrated me their success story in a very humble way. He was part of the “founding team” and is still very active today. I like having discussions with those e-commerce survivors. They are the one who really know the e-business.

Here are his 10 lessons I wanted to share with you:

1. Sell Compelling Product Range
2. Use exit
3. Dedicate yourself to superb customer service
4. Help customers to feel save
5. Use that data!
6. Keep in touch
7. Promote your online presence in your stores
8. Make your website easy to use
9. Choose for in-house software development
10. Under- promise & over- deliver!

It was a pleasure to attend eTail Europe in London this week. The most amaizing case was for me Zappos.com, the long tail for shoes. Tony Hsieh, CEO & Founder, told us their story in a very passionate and simple way. Like me, he is a survivor starting the business in 1999.

Zappos.com is one of the US e-commerce success story ranked nr 27 in the top 500 internet retailer 2008. 2007 sales : $850.000.000 with a growth rate of 42.38% and a conversion rate of 9.5%…and they have no master plan but are learning from mistakes!

Here are their 10 lessons I would like to share with you :

1. e-Commerce business is built on repeat customers

2. Word of mouth really works online

3. Do not compete on price but on the best service

4. Make sure your website inventory is 100% accurate (from 99% to 100%)

5. Centrally locate your distribution

6. Customer service is an investment not an expense

7. Start small & stay focused. It is OK to be patient

8. Don’ t be secretive. No top secret

9. You need to actively manage your company culture. Your culture is your brand

10. Be wary of so-called experts

First trial was 2 years ago with Quaero. It was a French-German project with companies behind it like France Telecom, Thomson, Deutsche Telecom en lots of European research institutes. They were going to compete against Google …but unfortunately they did not even come up with a beta version, it failed…The second chance is called Theseus. It is aiming to develop the world’s most advanced multimedia search engine for the next-generation Internet. It would translate, identify and index images, audio and text. De European Commission supports the project with a 120 mio€ grant.

Let’s hope that Europe will take this second chance because I strongly believe that we need a healthy competition on the search-engine market …Google, founded nearly nine years ago, is now one of the world’s best known- and most valuable-companies.

Since revolutionizing web search in the late 90s, Google has greatly improved the quality of its results without having really changed the look & feel. Microsoft & Yahoo alternatives look pretty much the same in content & form. The question is : ‘are there alternatives to global gloooogling ?’

Yes, one of them is ask.com trying to present its findings in a more usefull way. Instead of following the Google minimalist approach, where search results fill most of the page, ask.com divides the page into three columns.

The middle one contains the expected search results with ’sponsored links’ at the top. Many listings have a little binoculars icon left. If you go on mouse over, you will discover the image of the page the link takes you to, which will save you precious time.

The right-hand column offers two sets of suggestions that can make a difference:’narrow your search’ and ‘expand your search’. Say you type in ‘California vacation’, you will get more than 13 million results. The narrowing option includes suggestions such as ‘California vacation packages’ and ‘romantic vacation packages’ . The top narrowing option on this last suggestion is ‘Romantic vacation packages in new Hampshire’. No possible way to refine my California results…

The third column, down the right hand side of the page, contains an assortment of useful information related to the subject of the search.

Just give a try to ask.com!

For many who love to shop online like I do, the next best things to buying merchandise are browsing and chatting about merchandise-planning the next strike, so to speak. The continual evolution of social networking and consumer-generated content is enabling online shoppers to move beyond transactions to achieve shop-talk unlike anything they’ve ever experienced. It’s one big think to talk with a couple friends over dinner and get their opinions on the latest goods, but it’s something else entirely to get recommendations from and provide feedback to a couple hundred-thousand fellow consumers. A multitude of shoppers are able to interact & pick & choose & recommend products with other shoppers online. Social shopping sites enable just that ! They connect consumers and give rise to discussions and recommendations, unlike comparison shopping sites, which typically focus on weighting product prices and attributes. Further, they are independent of e-retailer sites and e-retailers product reviews. I think that e-retailers should take them seriously as they redefine e-commerce. Just here some US examples I find interesting : Kaboodle, ShopWiki, StyleFeeder, ThisNext, StyleHive and CrowdStrom.