Intelligence Collected: The Baynote Blog
Want A Little More Control in Your Shopping Experience?
By Jen Burns in eCommerce, Featured, Retail on March 22, 2013
“No piles, no mess, just an easier way for customers to control the store through their mobile application” Hointers, a new robotic/ecommerce retail store, is targeted at get-in-and-out-with-what-I-need-male shoppers, offering the ability to shop in store in a very different way. The shopper tries the jeans on by scanning them, and then they robo-magically appear in a dressing room alongside an easy “these don’t fit” chute and a mobile device ... Read More »
Machine Learning in Hive
By Robin Morris in A Word from the Engineers on March 20, 2013
As I’ve written before, we do a lot of our development here at Baynote in Hive, allowing us to leverage the power of our Hadoop cluster, whilst insulating us from writing low-level map-reduce jobs. One question that comes up on the hive mailing list from time-to-time is how to implement machine learning algorithms within Hive. Twitter told us how to do ... Read More »
To Deliver a Great Customer Experience, Know Thy Customer
By Marti Tedesco in Events, Featured, Retail on March 13, 2013
The mottos of top performing teams- sports or otherwise, tend to be really simple. For example, Nordstrom, the beloved retail powerhouse says this on their website: “Since 1901, we’ve been committed to providing our customers with thebest possible service—and to improving it every day.” When Jamie Nordstrom thinks about the customer experience they deliver, he knows that their ecommerce experience has to measure up and in some way deliver ... Read More »
Tips and Trends for Incorporating Social Channels into the Web Experience
By Jen Burns in Events, Social Networks on March 12, 2013
In a panel discussion on the future of social media and its integration with the web, several questions were asked to panel participants from Urban Outfitters, Jetblue, Under Armour and start-up company Reevo. Panelists described their objective for social media as bringing humanity back, customer support and showing personality of the brand and even personality of the store location. Most of the panelists also used several social channels, namely ... Read More »
Tracking Attribution for Customer Engagement and Conversion
By Marti Tedesco in Events on March 11, 2013
Attending speaking sessions at eTail West one starts to realize that not all online retailers are as sophisticated as the rest. In the session I attended yesterday, the talk was all about attribution. While most retailers can talk knowledgeably about the buyers journey or the “path to purchase”, not all have the same level of sophistication when it comes to tracking customers along that path. As a go forward ... Read More »
The Numbers Don’t Lie, or Do They?
By Marti Tedesco in eCommerce, Events on March 7, 2013
Personally, I love David Brooks. His op-ed articles and book The Social Animal display a thoughtfulness and intellect that goes beyond most editorialists these days. His recent New York Times article What Data Can’t Do (February 18, 2013) seems like it could have been written by a Baynote data scientist. In particular, Brooks mentions the fact that “Data obscures values… data is never raw; it’s always structured according to ... Read More »
The Facebook Update: What’s New in Facebook’s Integrated Platform?
By Jen Burns in Events, Social Networks on March 6, 2013
The intersection of Facebook and ecommerce may be appealing to apparel retailers, but for others, it fosters mixed emotions. Nicolas Franchet, Head of ecommerce at Facebook, spoke on the new marketing integrated platform that Facebook is offering to ecommerce companies. It’s fab-ulous for apparel retailers An excellent case study, Fab.com one of the fastest growing online retailers, shared that 30% of their daily referral traffic was ... Read More »
Not all eCommerce Organizations are Created Equal
By Marti Tedesco in eCommerce, Events on March 5, 2013
Life is hard for the ecommerce professionals within traditional brick and mortar retailers. This was clear from talking with retailers this week in Palm Springs. It’s hard for two reasons. First, retailers who start online like Hayneedle.com, Build.com, and the Knot have the advantage of having their entire ecommerce organization focused on optimizing the customer experience. Most have been laser focused on this since they launched online sometime in ... Read More »
February Personalization Roundup
By Dan Darnell in Featured, Personalization on February 28, 2013
Over the past month, we’ve been hearing a lot about the overlapping roles of the CMO and CIO as marketing shifts into the digital space and consumers expect relevant and personalized experiences across all touch points. With the changing market conditions, CMOs increasingly need the technical background to be able to analyze data and draw out insights to inform their marketing strategies. The IDC predicts that “Starting in ... Read More »
Forrester Focuses on the Total Ecommerce Experience
By Jen Burns in Events, Featured, Mobile Commerce, Onsite Search, Personalization on February 27, 2013
Popular Forrester analyst, Brian Walker was fighting a bit of a cold today, but “being hopped up on the cough medicine” didn’t stop him from doing a winning presentation this morning at eTail West. Stats were the opening slide to the conversation with over 29% of adults owning a tablet or an e-reader, 15% of ecommerce use being on mobile and 10% of their time spent with media. Mobile is ... Read More »