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.
ATG was founded on the idea of dynamic web sites. We know that the best sites are those that deliver the most relevant information to visitors — most timely, most accurate, most personal. The state of the art has advanced to the point where every piece of content — prices, offers, cross-sells, images — everything — whether displayed on a web page, in an email or even to a contact center agent, can be controlled by anything — identity of the visitor, segments or personas, browsing behavior, time of day, what’s in the shopping cart, purchase history — and yes, even inventory or profit margins.
The two tricks to making this work effectvely and efficiently are
- Having a highly generalized underlying rules processor built into the site infrastucture so that any action or characteristic of the visitor can be sensed, and any piece of content can be presented, and
- Presenting all that power to the merchandisers in an intuitive, easy-to-use, task-oriented application so they can implement their unique business strategies, and change them as frequently as they like, without launching IT projects.
Our customers are just beginning to deploy sites built this way, and as merchandisers realize how much more effective these sites can be, I expect dynamic, relevant, personalized sites to become an imperative for competitive etailing…
