Bob Tedeschi of the NY Times ran a great article today which we were fortunate enough to be a part of. It features the plans of one of our customers, Casual Male. It’s refreshing to see that more and more sites are adopting personalization as a way to better their customers’ experience and thus improve conversion rates.

On Monday we talked about the survey we co-sponsored about holiday expectations. Another notable statistic is worth commenting on: 48% of respondents will present ‘limited time offers’ to customers as a means for attracting customers this holiday season. I have always believed that the #1 key to online conversion is presenting the right offer to the right person at the right time.  People are looking for something online (either explicitly, or just browsing, looking for something that strikes them), and if you can present them with something that is what they want, they’ll buy it. If that offer is also what you most want to sell them, it’s a win-win (that’s the principle behind “searchandising”).

The interesting question to me is the balance (or tension) between an offer that fulfills a quest, and an offer that is just a good deal. To what extent will people buy something just because it is on sale, when they would not have been interested at all if it was not on sale? And importantly, does that behavior differ online from in-store? If the goal is to maintain loyalty among customers for the long-term, is the ‘limited time offer’ antiquated? Will savvier retailers improve their margins by replacing gimmicks with searchandising? Most would agree that the challenges facing online sellers versus brick and mortar are quite different—the blowout sale might still be effective on both, because everyone likes cheap goods (so long as the quality isn’t cheap), but a large part of why Black Friday exists is because of perfectly practical circumstance. Most people have the day off from work, so it’s a great day to spend time shopping. The fact that the retail world recognized this and offered promotions around it works wonders. But people don’t need a day off to shop online. In fact, more people probably shop at work or before bed than actually spend a day off sitting at their computer desk. So it makes sense that online traffic would surge during gift-buying season…but it also makes sense to enhance your site with easier site navigation and more customized merchandising than to simply entice one-time shoppers with the promise of 10% off.

One of the most interesting reads from last year’s coverage of online holiday shopping was a piece in BusinessWeek calling “Cyber Monday” (the Monday after Thanksgiving and supposed “Black Friday” of the eCommerce world) a marketing myth. Yet debate rages on about whether this is true. Recently, ATG co-sponsored a survey with Internet Retailer Magazine on how retailers are preparing for the holiday season, and what their expectations are. Nearly 78% of respondents expected that the period between Thanksgiving and the following ‘Cyber Monday’ would account for just 10 – 20% of their overall holiday sales—hardly the boon that some would have you believe.

When talking to retailers, reporters, and even industry analysts in the eCommerce space, we sometimes run into an issue where the person we’re speaking with is absolutely convinced that every company should—and does—want a hosted model of software. Far be it from us to knock SaaS—we offer our eCommerce solutions in both license/on-premise and on-demand deployments. But still, there are skeptics who just don’t “get it” that a one-size-fits-all approach is faulty.

Last month, Gartner released findings suggesting that in certain implementations, the Software as a Service model is not as cost-effective — or even effective — as earlier projections and experiences have led some companies to believe. Sure, it can be cheaper and offer an impressive speed to launch. For some retailers, this makes perfect sense and helps them get the best out of technology without having to put their hands in it. Yet, they say for complex, larger implementations this just isn’t your best bet.

It’s interesting, but there doesn’t even seem to be a consensus on the definition of SaaS. Forrester has a very rigid definition, calling out SaaS as “built from the ground up to be multi-tenant at all layers of the stack: database, server, and application.” Yet the more common view found in wikipedia is in line with our view that SaaS is “a model of software delivery where the software company provides maintenance, daily technical operation and support for the software provided to their client.” The key here is that there must be flexibility—the strictly multi-tenant approach does not work 100% of the time.

Serious merchants do not want to suffer the work or risk of downtime on someone else’s schedule — and the risk of upgrade problems is real. How does multi-tenant work in a situation where a single store needs more than one server—which is most serious merchants.  It doesn’t—even the multi-tenant players must use dedicated tenancy in this case.

We are multi-tenant in the parts of the stack where it makes sense, such as in data storage, and dedicated where that makes sense. The oldest rule is at play here—“treat customers how you want to be treated.” That means we should be treating each implementation uniquely, and offering what makes sense. Otherwise, you’re simply doing a disservice on the hope that you make a sale.

The front page on the Fox News Business section yesterday featured an article from eWeek about the consumer’s online experiences and how that may translate to consumer behavior in the store, good or bad. The piece stated that consumers who have a poor online experience will avoid that retailer’s brick-and-mortar stores as well – they consider it all one brand. It says that because only 6% of total holiday sales and 5% of annual sales are online, it is difficult to justify investing enough online to be successful.

This seems contradictory to me.  How much business is lost to the store, even though it is unmeasured, because of a poor online experience?  Some of our customers report that they measure a huge number of consumers shopping online but buying in the store (for the instant gratification) – and presumably a weak online experience would reduce that volume.

The piece also says that consumers expect consistency across channels.  Presumably this expectation extends beyond the physical and online stores into the call center experience also.

The bottom line is that being as sophisticated and competitive with your online presence is more important that ever – even if your online business is still a small fraction of your overall volume.

As this is the first official post for our new blog, eCommerce Insights, it’s befitting to start out with a disclosure. While this forum will house the opinions, commentary, and critiques of various people with somewhat diverse interests, it is a blog maintained and presented by ATG (Art Technology Group) and its employees. As the leader in eCommerce software, we’ve helped hundreds of web sellers produce superior online results and we are passionate about all aspects of eCommerce—from the technology supporting these web stores to the way merchandisers use them to shape the consumer’s shopping experience. Our business and our solutions are guided by the most basic principle that the stores that are most successful are those that deliver the most relevant and personal customer experience, from merchandising through customer service, and our job is to provide the platform and tools that allow our customers to deliver that superior online experience.

Of course, we think we’re doing a pretty good job at this, and it’s apparent that others do, too—just take a look at the growing number of customers implementing ATG products, and the feedback we’re receiving from industry analysts.

But the purpose of this blog is not to pat ourselves on the back or to sell you our products. Our newly re-designed website does that well enough already. What we hope to establish here is just a simple forum where we can talk about our passion—and where others can share their opinions on eCommerce, as well. If you’ve got something to say, by all means let us know. If you’re curious to know where we stand on some issue or even an industry controversy, bring it on. By starting our blog with this disclosure we hope to convey that we are only interested in having an honest, open dialogue with the eCommerce community.

So instead of belaboring that point, we might as well get started “conversing”…