Recommended reports
How We Shop in 2010: Habits and Motivations of Consumers
How We Shop in 2010: Habits and Motivations of Consumers is split into two separate documents for the US and UK, examining e-commerce consumer behavior in both countries. Both reports focus on how consumers interact with e-commerce brands, conduct product research and the different factors in the buying decision-making process.
Alternatively, see our Checkout Optimization Guide: 70 ways to increase conversion rates.
CEO at Econsultancy
11 January 2005 11:50am
One of our members is building their own white-label offering for the direct sales market, providing a platform to support third-party selling of their products. They will engage with other media owners (e.g. newspapers, catalogues, etc), and build a site with their branding and a selection of their items for sale.
They’re interested to know if there is any ’documented’ examples of how this is achieved by others, including the pricing engines, content management and reporting.
Is anyone aware of anything on this? What are the best standards in this arena? Any case studies?
Amazon’s platform is the obvious example with them running all of the Waterstone’s site (among others) and recently rumoured to be doing a deal with Marks and Spencer to run their e-commerce operations.
Ashley
MD at Screen Pages
13 January 2005 10:34am
At Screen Pages (www.screenpages.com) we have used Microsoft Commerce Server to create and manage white-labelled websites.
There are a number of factors which require consideration, most important, what are the variable elements from site to site: design/branding, catalogue (categories, products and prices), content pages (about us, terms and conditions etc), promotions (discounts, offers) of and the processes around the site itself (especially integration).
The underlying assumption in most cases is that the underlying function of the website (navigation, search, browsing, ordering etc) is the same. What changes is the product set (possibly prices) and the branding (simplistically the 200 by 120 pixel logo is switched and the red button is now blue).
An ideal solution would permit the rapid deployment of “clone” e-commerce websites, with templates (via XSLT or similar) to provide re-branding and tools which support the easy of differing content, promotions etc.
Classic best practice application systems design preaches separating the three important layers: presentation (brand, design, layout), logic (ecommerce functionality), data (catalogue, customers, orders etc). If the website is constructed in this way, a sound platform for creating white-labelled sites is in place.
A few examples:
*The RFU community shop (http://www.communityrugbyshop.com ) and the England netball site (http://shop.englandnetball.co.uk ) are white-labelled versions of Coachwise (http://www.1st4sport.com ), with different branding and a reduced catalogue. These sites are integrated into other sites (RFU and English netball).
* House of Bath operates multiple brands under the same domain (www.houseofbath.co.uk ), each with their own catalogue. The basket, account and other content pages are identical.
Grand Prix Legends (www.grandprixlegends.com ) is similar, with multiple branded sites driven by different catalogues.
In a B2B e-commerce context, a single site can be driven by different custom price lists (with separate customer logon and branding). Integration requires consideration: what happens to a website order? Where does stock come from?
The logical extension of this strategy can be used to support multiple, identical sites each with different “catalogues”, languages and currencies.
Roger Willcocks
CEO at Econsultancy
13 January 2005 11:23am
Thanks for that Roger.
Venda provide managed e-commerce solutions and there's quite a bit of detail on their products / services in their white papers which can be downloaded at http://www.venda.com/page/products_overview - could be helpful for thinking through what 'building blocks' are required for a large-scale e-commerce operation.
Ashley
Product Marketing at Google UK
18 January 2005 08:56am
Ashley
Snow Valley is another good UK-based white-label eCommerce platform/ASP, similar to Venda. They also have case studies on their website: http://www.snowvalley.com/casestudies.asp
In the US, Fry Multimedia is a leading ASP, providing the eCommerce platform for retailers like Eddie Bauer and Crate & Barrel. Case studies at http://www.fry.com/clients/default.asp. Interestingly they are also a third party integrator for Amazon's Merchant's @, i.e. Fry helps retailers set up on Amazon's platform.
Also in the US and more similar to the Amazon model, eToys is now providing third party services of online toy retailing to a number of US retailers such as Sears, Macy's and Buy.com. I think this includes more than the technology, i.e. also inventory and warehousing. See article on InternetRetailer.com:
http://www.internetretailer.com/dailynews.asp?id=13778
Best wishes
Obi
Marketing Manager at Snow Valley Ltd
14 February 2005 16:40pm
Thanks Obi!
Snow Valley has a lot of experience of developing e-commerce solutions of this type.
Most of our clients opt for the fully-customised solution, but we also cater for two separate scenarios that apply to your ‘white label’ question.
The first option involves one main owner and lots of sites – this is what we are doing for Premium TV and their 80-odd football clubs. PTV can add products and promotions of their own, and they have a reporting system that spans all the sites, but the clubs largely control their own catalogue and process the orders themselves.
In option two there are multiple storefronts but they all feed into one single back-end, through one ERP system and one central warehouse that handles fulfilment. We are providing a solution for SP Etail on this basis - they handle online merchandising for The Football Association among others.
I can send you case studies of these projects to give you a better idea – just drop me a mail at
Sarah
Head of Business at Zed Zed Productions
22 November 2010 13:53pm
I know this post is over 5 years old now however I think it is important to keep threads like this alive as this and other pages are still within the Search Engines SERPS.
Zed Zed Productions which is a company that I work for are industry leaders in providing any white label websites solution no matter how simple or advanced.
If you require more details on the services that we provide then we would be more than happy to show you our portfolio of clients and the many different systems that we have in place. Please do not hesitate to email me, you can also follow the above link for additional information