Platforms

Ecommerce technology is failing to meet merchant needs: report

Companies are reporting the underperformance of ecommerce solutions in critical areas of functionality such as site search, product management, SEO and mobile-supported commerce.

These deficiencies, coupled with difficulties with integration, have led many merchants to replatform, according to Econsultancy’s first survey-based Technology for Ecommerce Report.

The reports, carried out in association with Neoworks, shows that only a minority of respondents say their technology performs well across each of the key functionality requirements.

In this post I’ll look in more detail at some findings of this new report based on a survey of more than 500 client-side and agency respondents

Legacy technologies still the biggest headache for the C-Suite

Agility, however you want to define it, should help to speed up iteration and therefore increase profit and customer satisfaction.

The working methods agility predicates may also help to increase staff satisfaction.

It can be argued that agility is achieved through innovation:  setting aside some time to focus on ideas that may not be central to the core business. At the moment, I’d argue innovation isn’t particularly widespread, as many organisations’ attitude towards it is ’70:20:that’s not what we pay you for’.

Indeed, the double whammy of the recession and many governments’ subsequent focus on ‘the need for efficiency savings’ has set a tone that makes innovation even riskier.

The fact is though, fortune favours the brave, and in times of economic hardship (darn it, I’ve slipped into bureaucratese), those that spend money adapting to a surfeit of new and relevant technologies may well see success.

But what about all those non-innovating, anti-Eric-Schmidt business leaders? They must be struggling with something. They aren’t wilfully blind. Perhaps legacy technology and the difficulty of extricating an organisation from its knotted innards is what’s holding some business leaders back.

Ahead of our first Digital Transformation Leaders’ Conference, I wanted to mull over technology.

Ford Retail Group: bringing customer experience into the boardroom

At JUMP, part of the Festival of Marketing, Celia Pronto, Head of Marketing and Ecommerce at Ford Retail Group, spoke about bringing customer experience (CX) into the boardroom.

I’ve summarised what she had to say about this large and changing sector. For anyone high up the marketing chain, looking to change the way their company does business (with direct links to revenue!), this is salient and bang up to date.

Emerging Platforms and Trends – watch our latest #IMW13 hangout live

This session will be a feast of everything new. We’ll touch on future TV, digital out of home, and the multiscreen experience. Anything you want to talk about, we will! Come join us to discuss the future of marketing and how it’ll affect what you do and when you do it. 

Update – unfortunately we suffered Google+ connectivity issues during this session, and were forced to cut the hangout short-we’ve posted the first part of the session here, and will post a follow up post with more detail soon. 

Watch the hangout live >>>

Facebook apps: there’s no such thing as a free audience

Facebook’s success hasn’t only netted its founders, early employees and investors billions of dollars, the world’s largest social network has built an ecosystem that has served as the foundation for other businesses collectively worth billions.

From large social gaming companies like Zynga all the way to individual developers building Facebook apps out of their bedrooms, Facebook’s launch of a development platform in 2006 proved to be a game-changer for online entrepreneurs.

Pinterest changes its look. Can it do the same for social commerce?

https://assets.econsultancy.com/images/resized/0002/8410/pin_1-blog-third.jpgImage sharing social platform Pinterest is currently testing a new look, granting access to a ‘select few’ users before rolling out changes to in the near future. 

So far, so-so. Not a day passes without social sites tinkering with their layout or functionality, but given Pinterest’s incredible performance in the realm of ecommerce referrals, this could be an important one.

Let’s take a closer look…

Twitter prepping launch of advertising API: report

Last year, Facebook went public in what was one of the most highly-anticipated and, as it turned out, disastrous IPOs of all time. In the past several months, the world’s largest social network has managed to convince Wall Street that it will eventually monetize its billion-plus users.

That’s good news for the number two social network, Twitter. Last week, reports surfaced that global investment powerhouse BlackRock is reportedly looking to buy $80m of Twitter shares from early employees, and some believe that the company will look to go public as soon as this year.

Instagram gives Twitter a taste of its own medicine

Twitter wants to be a media company, and its efforts to become one have created a lot of collateral damage.

That’s not at all surprising: when the company was positioned as a communications platform with an open API, developers flocked to take advantage of the connately-flowing river of data that Twitter produces. But many of those developers, as well as companies like LinkedIn, had to be cut off as Twitter’s desire to be a media company realistically requires it to control the user experience, and how its content is displayed, in consumer channels.

Can Zynga wean itself off Facebook fast enough?

After a rocky start, Facebook’s life as a publicly-traded company has settled down a bit. Despite healthy skepticism about its prospects in light of a $100bn valuation, its stock price has stabilised (for now) while industry observers and investors are taking stock of its actual — not hypothetical — business.

But one of Facebook’s best friends, social gaming giant Zynga, hasn’t been so fortunate. Today, its stock plunged to under $5, its lowest level since the company went public last year.

For Flattr, mobile becomes more of a barrier, less of an opportunity

Despite all of the well-documented challenges facing organizations that are trying to take advantage of the rapid rise of mobile, mobile presents what may be one of the greatest business opportunities for many companies.

It’s not hard to understand why: there are estimated to be more than 5.5bn handsets in use globally today, making the mobile phone one of the most ubiquitous devices ever. 

In developed and emerging nations, a growing number of those phones are smartphones that offer always-on access to the web.

Can Zynga succeed as a platform?

Yesterday’s announcement that it is effectively becoming a platform may be the most important yet in the short history of social gaming juggernaut Zynga.

Although it’s a billion dollar company, Zynga owes much of its success to another platform – Facebook.

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