Technology

"Five years from now, we'll be more focused on our delivery business, with a higher mix of technology, and sell more private-label products," Ron Sargent, Staples' chairman/CEO, told investors attending the 26th Sanford Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference. "There will be more services in our mix, because there is not a lot of inventory and the margins are great.” The company will continue to expand its technology offerings. "We're already the third-largest reseller of computers, behind Best Buy and Walmart, but the problem with computers is that the more you sell, the more you lose — you price them low and promote them heavily."

Do you know which keywords are driving phone calls to your business? Are the pay-per-click (PPC) keywords “red shoes” making the phone ring? Or perhaps calls are coming from searches initiated with “black pumps” or “wedge sandals”? Whether you’re spending $600 a month on PPC or six figures, it’s imperative to know how your online marketing efforts affect your offline sales conversions.

In today's retail/direct/online environment, it's logical and essential to have a holistic approach to making any investment decisions. Too often people look at only one problem, tool or solution at a time. In today's market, that narrow focus puts integrated retailers at a serious competitive disadvantage.

Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group, Inc. is a Fortune 1000 company headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Driven by the mission “Value Every Time”, the company, through its brands Dollar Rent A Car and Thrifty Car Rental, serves value-conscious travelers in over 70 countries.

Dollar and Thrifty have over 700 corporate and franchised locations in the United States and Canada, and operate in virtually all of the top U.S. and Canadian airport markets. The Company’s 6,800 employees are located mainly in North America, but global service capabilities exist through an expanding international franchise network.

According to a report by the Aberdeen Group entitled “The Performance of Web Applications — Customers Are Won or Lost in One Second,” one second delays in response time significantly impact top business goals.

One second delays can reduce:

• page views by 11%
• conversions by 7%
• customer satisfaction by 16%
Aberdeen Analyst Bojan Simic and Gomez CTO Imad Mouline discuss:
• Top strategic actions companies are taking to advance web application performance.
• Best practices for ensuring your most important web pages and transactions perform properly.

In part 1 of this two-part series from our August issue, we classified e-commerce systems into four essential groups: bundled suites, enterprise leaders, niche players and experienced multichannel partners.

Ensuring great experiences for today’s rich and complex web applications requires a new approach to performance testing. Application owners, e-business and marketing managers, QA & IT operations all need to ensure mission & business critical transactions perform flawlessly.

Until recently, selecting the optimum e-commerce platform for a multichannel business was a race to keep up with evolving technologies. The applications morphed at such blinding speed that the needs and requirements you defined when selecting your system easily could be obsolete by the time that system was up and running. Today's technology isn't evolving any slower — if anything, the pace of e-commerce change continues to accelerate. But the main differentiators among systems these days are less in the features and functions they support than the services they offer, flexibility, scalability, technical support, and the vendors' approach to charging for licenses or services. In short, your biggest challenge in selecting a platform may be determining which provider will be your best business partner going forward.

I had breakfast with a couple at a conference recently. The woman was the founder of a business that sells beads to home hobbyists for bracelets and necklaces. Her partner runs the back-office operations for the business. I asked how they started their business.

The nature of the internet business model allows more centralized inventory control and more efficient order and fulfillment management than a retail store network. And of course with centralized fulfillment, online merchants don’t incur the cost of distributing inventory around the country, or even throughout a region. In addition, they can extend or cancel promotions depending upon demand and inventory levels.