The pulse of Alexander Interactive

Cyber Monday 2011 was the single biggest day of online shopping.  Ever.  And, some of our earlier predictions of sales continuing to hold strong beyond Monday have held true: the newly dubbed “Cyber Week” saw online retailers rake in $6 billion, according to comScore.  This is up 15% from the same period in 2010.

Consumers expect deals, sales, and discounts all week long.  In fact, they will expect them up until the very last day that they can get free shipping and guaranteed delivery before December 24th.  The implication for the savvy marketer is that one must no longer just focus on readying promotions for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but instead on a strategy that continues to keep a site top of mind throughout the entire holiday shopping season.

Will 2012 bring Cyber Month?

Tablet commerce may be the new kid on the block when it comes to online retail, but as a recent Forrester research poll indicates, many online retailers are seeing that half of their mobile commerce transactions come from tablet devices.

Moreover, 7.6 percent of the U.S. population will be tablet users by the end of 2012, according to eMarketer estimates. So how should online retailers take advantage of tablet commerce? And should they do so right now?

It Starts With Your Existing Site

The key to implementing a successful tablet commerce (t-commerce) strategy starts with a retailer’s existing desktop site. Customers are already shopping with their tablets on traditional retail websites — but sites that were not designed for tablets may run into issues.

User interface elements that proved successful on the desktop may not work on a tablet. For example, mega-dropdowns and mouse “hover” behaviors do not translate well to a finger-based browsing experience: Users don’t generally drag their finger around the screen looking for hotspots.

Users Deserve a Tablet-Optimized Site

Tablets are different from mobile devices and should be treated accordingly. A troubling early development in t-commerce had a number of retailers redirecting tablet users to their mobile-optimized sites. This was a mistake, and is largely being replaced with retailers deploying tablet-optimized experiences.

There is a huge difference in screen real estate between tablets and mobile, and a t-commerce site should therefore have more in common with a traditional e-commerce site than an m-commerce one. The fact that many mobile sites were delivered first means that many retailers are not taking advantage of the larger screen real estate that is available on a tablet.

The t-commerce site should still maintain a sleek user interface while delivering substantially more information than an m-commerce site. As with mobile, the quality of content delivered must be commensurate with the quality of information on the company’s e-commerce site so that the user experience is consistent.

Moreover, the interface of a tablet is different than that of a desktop site. On a tablet, one doesn’t track clicks and mouse trails, but instead must focus on “smudges and swipes.” Multitouch functionality should be integrated into the site in appropriate areas, including 360-degree product photography spins and swiping through long product lists.

HTML5 Enables Rich Interactions

Technological developments have opened up possibilities that did not exist years ago. HTML5 offers site developers the ability to create superior, smooth user experiences, and it enables other must-haves for tablet sites, such as auto-suggest search bars and one-page checkouts.

At the same time, these technological advancements can pose significant challenges to retailers looking to develop a tablet initiative. For example, it is widely accepted that Apple(Nasdaq: AAPL) and its iPad are dominant in the tablet ecosystem.

As a number of retail sites still use Flash for certain interactions (which Apple does not support), the necessary migration toward the use of HTML5 technology can mean extra costs and delays.

It’s Not Just the iPad

Another factor to keep in mind for a tablet initiative is that even though the iPad is the dominant player in the industry, there are many other tablets, including the Samsung Galaxy, RIM PlayBook, Motorola (NYSE: MOT) Xoom, and others that run on Google’s (Nasdaq: GOOG) Android platform.

While they comprise a relatively small segment of the market, these other tablets certainly warrant additional cross-device testing of a retailer’s website to ensure compatibility.

Establish Goals and Watch the Analytics

As with all digital initiatives, analytics should be watched closely. Retailers must monitor the conversion success of their websites with tablet users, finding areas that under- or over-perform relative to their desktop-based shoppers.

Do your tablet users browse more then they search? Is this different behavior than desktop users? Just like on the desktop, testing is key. Retailers should experiment with multiple shopping experiences, allowing consumer usage patterns to shape the future of their tablet offerings.

It is also important to establish revenue goals for a tablet initiative. Tablets, despite the huge boom in recent popularity, may not yet be ubiquitous enough to warrant a huge initiative for all retailers.

Adoption of tablets is expected to increase 400 percent by 2012, based on eMarketer estimates, but it is important to keep in mind that this is a global statistic for a niche market.

Some may feel the need to be there first, others may want to wait and see. What is certain is that t-commerce is rapidly growing, and it must be considered an important piece of any online retailer’s digital strategy.

Happy swiping!

Enjoy the holiday weekend.

June 8th means bring your kids to work day.  They surveyed a few of us and the results are in…

In what state were you born?

In what country were you born?

We’ve certainly expanded our global footprint since the last survey.

Ebay today announced they are acquiring everyone’s favorite ecom platform Magento.  They already owned 49% of the platform and have announced plans to roll Magento into some new X.Commerce initiative.  This is a very smart move for EBay.  Have recently acquired GSI to offer an enterprise solution at the very top of the online retail food chain, EBay can even more effectively compete at the entry- and mid-levels of ecommerce.

We’re huge fans of Magento here at Ai, and will be watching this development closely.  On the one hand, the additional engineering resources, marketing, product stewardship, and enterprise support will be welcomed by ecom brands and developers alike.  Graduating from a 49% strategic investment to a fully-blown integrated product suite should come with the commensurate level of attention from EBay execs.

On the other hand, all too often we’ve seen thriving software platforms gobbled up by larger companies primarily with the intent of folding the acquired company’s customers into the acquirer’s existing product suite.  This may not be welcome news for us Magento devs out there that enjoy direct access to the source code of the product and significant engineering accumen and performance tuning experience on the platform.

We will certainly keep our eyes on this and report back to our friends and clients any important implications.  In the meantime, congratulations to the folks at Magento and founder Roy Rubin.

Google recently released Google Correlate, a fascinating tool that correlates user-supplied data sets with search terms.  From big Goog’s blog post:

Using Correlate, you can upload your own data series and see a list of search terms whose popularity best corresponds with that real world trend.

We’re data nerds here, obsessed with trends, the wisdom of the crowd, analytics, and optimization.  The possibility to find meaningful trends for our customers (and the greater good!) are too large to fathom–and can quickly give you a headache when you think about the power of correlating people’s interests around the world with trends in our own data.

So I decided to give it a try.  With a layup, as it were.  What would happen if I fed the weekly pageviews to the Ai site into the magic machine?  I know that one of the more common ways people land at our site is by searching for “alexander interactive,” but could GoogleCorrelate2000 figure this out from our pageviews?

YES.  In 1.20 seconds (much of which certainly was network latency).  I pasted 52 rows of data, and as a reminder for those reading along, didn’t tell Google what the data was.  She didn’t know I was interested in Alexander Interactive.  She gots dates and some numbers.  And here was her response:

Now it’s time to have some fun with this.  Google generously allows you to use their Search By Drawing tool.  Draw a line, see what it’s correlated with.  I had to cut myself off as you could spend hours with this:

We’re so taken with this tool that we are holding an internal contest for the one among us to find the most interesting, useful, or important search term trend in one of our analytics or ecommerce data sets.  The victor wins the admiration of his/her colleagues.  And free lunch at any local eatery.  Stay tuned for more on Google Correlate.

We’ve made it a tradition to share a puzzle or brainteaser as Ai heads into the holiday break each year.  We close the office between Christmas and New Year’s and wouldn’t want our brains to atrophy without the rigorous challenge of a quality puzzle.

This year, I stumbled across a pocket version of everyone’s favorite 80′s game, Simon.  The cacophony after the gifting ceremony was overwhelming, to say the least.  Pocket Simon joins the ranks of past favorites Rubik’s Cube, Terrible Rubik’s Knockoff that No One Understood and Couldn’t Do, and Interesting Twisted Knot Made of Plastic.  We’ll hold a competition in January for the longest string of blinking lights.  The pre-holiday record stands at 22.

Wishing all of our co-workers, friends, family, clients, and colleagues the very happiest of holidays and a terrific New Year.

Columbus Day means bring your kids to work day.  They surveyed a few of us and the results are in…

Where did you grow up?

In what country did you grow up?

This morning I enjoyed re-reading Clifford Stoll’s 1995 Newsweek piece, Why Web Won’t Be Nirvana.  While 15 years later most of his observations on information overload and the lack of content curation abound, how delightfully wrong he was in predicting the failure of “cyberbusiness.”

Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn’t—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

It appears our industry has done a fine job addressing all of Stoll’s concerns, save for thankfully not making stores obsolete (and arguably positioning great multi-channel retailers even stronger because of their web businesses).  We certainly can point and click for great deals.  I don’t remember ordering an airline ticket in the last 10 years and not doing it online.  OpenTable can almost always snag a last minute reservation for me at the latest NYC hotspot.  While their usability leaves a great deal to be desired, web-based contract negotiation tools drive billions in global procurement.

And speaking of a “trustworthy way to send money over the Internet,” while we haven’t yet found nirvana, in 2009, $209.6 billion was spent by consumers typing credit card numbers into a white box on a website.  People trust sending their money over the Internet.

Sure, we lack nuanced salespeople in our digital world.  That saleswoman who tells me I look fabulous in that suit will never lose her job to ecommerce.  But we sure do come close to the same results.  On more than one occasion we’ve all experienced that bizarrely efficient and shockingly accurate “others who purchased” recommendation, and went for it.  Dynamic personalization is the salesperson of the future, and she’s being implemented today in almost all of our modern ecommerce work.

It sure is easy to criticize Stoll with the 20/20 vision of hindsight, and most unfair not to offer ecommerce predictions for 2011 and beyond of my own.  Stay tuned to this page in the coming weeks.

Earlier this week I was invited to speak at my son’s 1st grade class. The topic was entirely open-ended: arrive, talk for an hour about something that I know about, and contribute to educating the future leaders of America.

I opted to teach the cadre of six- and seven-year-old learners about “How the Web Works.” A few slides on the Internet, a few fun screenshots of websites, something called “HTML,” a brave dive into the world of desktops-routers-servers, and a lot of Q&A. I did not know what to expect in terms of the class’ understanding of websites, their purpose, or how they work.
Was I ever pleasantly surprised.

These kids knew everything. I showed BrainPopJr.com, FreshDirect.com, Amazon.com, SteinerSports.com, Disney.com, YouTube, Skype, Google Weather, Google Maps, and more. Every kid knew every site. “That’s where Mommy and Daddy buy our groceries.” “Yeah, we buy LEGOs, books, and Wii games there.” “Can we watch Kittens Inspired By Kittens?”

They knew what a web browser was. They could identify every modern browser. Unsurprisingly, they asked “What’s that N thing?”

Beyond the digital, I wanted to give the kids a sense of how everything on the web ties together. Stretching my own arts and crafts capabilities beyond their sensible limits, I prepared a number of wearable pictures of desktops, routers, and servers. We embarked on a game to route Internet traffic.

The kids wearing computers looked down at the site on their chest, found an available router walking around, connected a cable to the router, the router found the appropriate server for the site, connected a cable, the server connected back to the router, router back to the computer. Rinse and repeat. Seventeen times, with 17 giggling kids and their patient teachers. The scene quickly devolved into the controlled chaos of blue and red yarn crisscrossing the room. I think the kids got it. They certainly had fun clipping yarn to each other.

We returned to the digital Interwebs to enjoy the lighter side the Net. If nothing else I got to use all of the Keynote effects that Ai’s Design Director never lets me have fun with during our sales pitches, most notably when I got to “peel away” a web page revealing the HTML under the hood. That felt great (Sorry Nathan.)

Now it was YouTube time. I sheepishly glanced at the head teacher, asking with my eyes, “Is this ok? Trust me…” and got back a subtle “Yes, but you better know what you’re doing” nod.

If you thought Internet celebrity videos were funny to watch crowded around Pete-from-accounting’s cube, I encourage you to try out a few with first graders.

Numa Numa incited a spontaneous 34-arm-flailing hysterical dance you’d more likely expect to see at a Phish concert. Think your co-workers do a good British accent? You should have heard my son’s classmates lamenting Charlie’s teething woes. And forget about that Sweet, Confectionery Precipitation. That just wasn’t fair to the teachers that had to deal with these kids for the five hours following my presentation.

I had an incredible time. Most important, I learned quickly that the future of the web is in very capable hands. And I got to use the Keynote Sparkle effect.