Last week, I attended the A.G. Edwards Retail Technology conference in Coral Gables, Florida.  I felt bad that I was enjoying a sunny 82 degrees while my wife back in the Boston area was enjoying something between 8 and 2.  But the presenters made me feel better.  They were a mix between vendors of technolgy to retailers, and some leading retailers– CIOs, CEOs, presidents of direct businesses.  I was impressed by how technology-diven many retailers have become.  Far beyond back-end operational systems, technology now controls many of the merchandising decisions.  For many of the most succesful merchants, decisions on planning, allocation, size mix, pricing, and markdowns are driven not by experience and inuition but almost entirely by data and algorithms.I can’t help but feel like, many times, paradoxically, web sites are the part of retailing least driven by technology.  How many sites present products based on what some web designer thought was a good idea, vs. how many test everything constantly?  How many sites present the same home page or special offers to every visitor, when we all know that that information may be irrelevant to many of the visitors? 

  

I read last week that Mercado Software has introduced a product that will “automatically add and remove products based on inventory and profit margins”.  This may be interesting in some cases (and a  very scary thought to some), but misses the larger point.  The eTailing Group, in their The Merchant Speaks survey last year, reports that over 50% of merchants change web store elements weekly or more often, and that an increasing number of the best sites change their home page daily.   Further, they report that 83% of merchants make changes primarily manually, and only 7% primarily deliver personalized changes.