Industry Eye: Tech Talk and Catalogers’ Updates
Tech Talk
◊ Find Which Parts of Your Site Don’t Work
Customer experience management solutions provider Gomez has launched Actual Experience XF, an on-demand service designed to measure the online customer experience. The product takes into account performance aspects such as download times, abandonment rates and service consistency.
Actual Experience XF also measures the differences in retail site performance caused by geographic location, or user-specific parameters, such as browser type, size of browser window, browser cache use, and first-time or repeat visitor status. The solution measures the effect each of these factors has on sales conversion or shopping cart abandonment and lets online merchants figure out which parts of their sites are responsible for any changes to the bottom line.
u M.O.M.’s Latest
Direct marketing software provider Dydacomp has released Mail Order Manager (M.O.M.) 6.0, the newest iteration of its order management software. New features include the ability to track highest and lowest performing products, sales staff performance, advertising statistics, reports that can be delivered to mobile devices, and increased access speed to customer order history and sales information. M.O.M. 6.0 also enables system administrators to require manager authorization for price and discount changes.
Catalogers’ Updates
Mergers & Acquisitions
u FOH Holdings, the parent company of multichannel lingerie merchant Frederick’s of Hollywood in December merged with intimate apparel manufacturer and marketer Movie Star Inc. The resulting company will be called Frederick’s of Hollywood Group. Expected to close in the second quarter of this year, the deal is valued at approximately $30.6 million.
u Book and gift catalog Bas Bleu was acquired in January by Universal Screen Arts, a multi-title catalog company whose books include What on Earth, Art and Artifact, Signals and Wireless. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Launch
u Online retail giant Amazon.com in January launched Endless.com, the first stand-alone retail Web site the company has started on its own. The site features shoes and handbags, and offers free overnight shipping on all of its 250 brands and 15,000 styles.
Correction
In January’s “Understanding Postal” column, we erroneously listed the letter size maximum for catalogs as 6-1/4 inches by 11-1/2 inches by 3/4-inches. Although we had maximum letter lenth correct at 11-1/2 inches, the actual correct height is 6-1/8 inches and the correct maximum thickness is 1/4-inch.
