Yesterday was a great day for us here at ATG, as we announced another terrific quarter. With growth in overall online shopping slowing, today’s online sellers are faced with a daunting task: to win the “loyalty wars”, competing for consumers’ attention (and more importantly, their loyalty). One way that ATG leads the e-Commerce industry is by helping companies develop their brands online and successfully create loyal customer bases, hence the tremendous market opportunities a lively and competitive market creates for us. Each quarter, more of the world’s leading brands turn to us to find out how they can get ahead of the curve, and lead the next generation of e-commerce.

Today, we don’t want to focus on what we’re doing to usher in this new era. Instead, we want to know where you think the industry is going. We’re announcing what we think is one of the most exciting industry-oriented initiatives we have ever launched.  We are officially kicking-off the call for entries for the 1^st ATG E-Commerce Ingenuity Business Plan Competition. 

We at ATG have always fostered creativity and forward-thinking, and we want to extend this part of our corporate culture to the e-commerce industry at-large. Open to entrepreneurs, start-ups and early-stage companies alike, we’re inviting tomorrow’s leaders to share their well-developed, ingenious, and ground-breaking business plans and make history.
One will win a $50,000.00 prize to make their plan a reality!


Share the link: www.atg.com/ingenuity with all of the most ingenious people you know, or who ATG’s expert panel of judges should know. Think of professional associations, networking groups, friends, mentors, students, and all types of visionaries. Spread word of the competition to your friends and colleagues that need inspiration or who have already started developing their e-commerce dreams - and be a part of this exciting initiative. 
 
Let the competition begin! 

Technorati Tags: ATG, e-Commerce, Innovation, Ingenuity, Business Plan Contest, Thought Leadership, Startups, Entrepreneur, Competition

Yesterday, I posted the first part of my recent article in ATG’s montly online newletter, ATG Insight. Below is the rest of the story…

So now what?
Of course there is a long list of tasks required to deliver the kind of experience the Millenials (and their parents, like me) are after. And only you know precisely what will work for your business and target customers. Yet at the highest level, I believe there are four overarching objectives for merchants looking to sustain - or better yet, expand - e-commerce growth:

• Personalize the Web customer experience to deliver more relevant products and content. Consider “micro-targeting” approaches that use everything you know about a customer to deliver a highly personalized experience. Moreover, use rich media to improve the online experience and make it entertaining (while being careful not to sacrifice efficiency!).
• Give direct Web store control to merchandisers and marketers that will enable a rapid rate of change. And equip those merchandisers with easy access to customer intelligence that will enable them to understand customer behavior, and empower them to create the most effective promotions. Armed with the right tools and access to your online storefront, merchandisers can greatly increase your company’s revenue and lower inventory expenses.
• Arm customer service agents with better information and tools to increase conversions at escalation points. Make it your goal to change your customer service department from a cost center to a revenue generator.
• Build upon a commerce platform that can support increased volume and customer dynamics, yet is flexible enough to support competitive differentiation.

A change in approach
As many of you know, we at ATG are not newcomers to the world of e-commerce. Our platform has been around for well over a decade. But that doesn’t mean we don’t recognize the need to continually change and evolve our offerings. And that is exactly what we’ve been up to. We recognize that delivering the kind of e-commerce experience that I described earlier takes more than a transaction engine with some point products bolted on in an attempt to support merchandising and customer support efforts. It takes a truly integrated yet flexible approach. We’ve been hard at work to deliver the industry’s only comprehensive, highly scalable e-commerce solution to drive the complete customer lifecycle of online sales, marketing and service - manageable from a single platform and delivered by a single vendor. Our flexible, component-based e-commerce software architecture enables you to personalize the online buying experience for your customers, making it easy for them to find desired products, comparison shop, register for gifts, pre-order items, redeem coupons, and much more. OK, I’ll stop there. But I would encourage you to take a look at how our offerings are evolving in an effort to support the changing customer - and your changing business. Better yet, let me know what you think and how we can continue to expand our solutions to best meet the demands you’re facing.

Technorati Tags: e-commerce, ecommerce, Millenials, online shopping

(NOTE: The following is the first half of a piece I wrote for the most recent ATG Insight Online Newsletter. The rest will follow in the next day or two. If you like what you read, please take a look at the full newsletter and sign up to receive it each month.)

Have we entered the “dot calm” era? Some industry pundits have been buzzing about it in recent months, citing statistics that the rate of online commerce growth is slowing.

Sure, the rate of growth is slowing but is that really so surprising? Online shopping is now mainstream, which means people are comfortable doing it - so comfortable, in fact, that some are predicting online sales will double in the next five years to some $350 billion.

But comfort can lead shoppers to boredom…an online world-weariness even. Which means that we - as e-sellers - can’t get too comfortable. Since the dawn of the e-commerce era, we have figured out the basics - built the infrastructure and enticed consumers to come, shop and even share a little. But, while we have made great strides, our creativity is far from tapped. We’ve taken a careful approach to the Web and have related it to established channels. We have augmented the print catalog with the Web catalog. We have shifted marketing mailboxes from the driveway to the Web. And we have built a shopping process that assumes that you push a cart through the store and checkout by the exit. The channel has been established and has even become ingrained. It has eased customer adoption, enabled us to learn the operations and helped us gain credibility. But have we fully optimized the shopping experience? Could we create more than convenience? Is it possible that the rate of e-commerce growth could actually rise if we could better replicate, or even improve upon, the experience of the lively brick-and-mortar store?

We need to acknowledge emerging dynamics - and think about their consequences
It’s time for us to bring e-commerce to a new level. That’s not to say we should altogether abandon what’s worked in the past or what we are doing now, but it does require us to alter our approach and open our eyes to the changing realities of e-commerce and the customers we serve. The truth is that business metrics show serious room for improvement. Consider these facts:

• 25% of online shoppers abandon their shopping cart (Forrester)
• 47% of e-commerce sites do not know their abandonment rate (Internet Retailer Magazine)
• 40% of online shoppers are dissatisfied with their online purchase experience (Forrester)

Meanwhile, conversion rates, visitor traffic, online revenue growth and online profitability vary greatly from e-seller to e-seller - which indicates that we are sorely lacking in the repeatable models and best practices needed for ongoing success across the e-commerce arena. And is if that’s not enough, we also face a major change in the customers we serve. We need to ready ourselves to meet the Millenials (you know, those people born after 1982). They represent about $200 billion in spending power annually - and by some estimates, they will spend as much as 17 percent of that online. But they are very different from their predecessor — GenXers and Baby Boomers — in some important ways. They are a perpetually connected, multi-tasking, fickle crowd who know what they want and aren’t afraid to “click around” until they get it.  They aren’t brand loyalists; rather, they demand a personalized, satisfying and entertaining experience - no matter what they are shopping for. They aren’t impressed that you can offer “multi-channel” commerce. For Millenials, the ability to do business with you across channels is merely table stakes. For them, channels are access points, not operations. What really matters is whether or not you know them when they cross channels. In just a few years they will be your average customer - and they will likely drive other generations’ behavior, which may soon share their expectations.

The truth is that we are largely unprepared to deal with the heightening demands of the customers we serve. Some merchants are trying to keep up, but outmoded approaches are making it challenging and unsustainable. For example, about 50 percent of merchants are trying to at least appear dynamic by changing Web store elements weekly or more (for the most part, they are adjusting homepages). An astounding 83% of merchants are making these changes manually (no wonder they aren’t diving deeper than the homepage!). Merchants want to do better. They want to do things like personalize the shopping experience - and some are doing it in limited ways on the Web and in e-mail. But to make that happen, merchants need more efficiency and a better approach.

(Next up in tomorrow’s post: what to do about all this!)

Technorati Tags: e-commerce, ecommerce, Millenials, online shopping