rickwatson

[rickwatson]

Secret Guide to Managing Milennials #hashtagedition

#careaboutwhattheysay

#tellthetruth

#end

[rickwatson]

Thought this was a good website to start with for anyone looking to learn about what truly matters in SEO.  Just experts in an industry showing how they would evaluate any site.

#seo

[rickwatson]

What Makes a Great Product Manager? Can You See Around Corners?

I wrote up this document for some of my team members and thought it might be useful in the wild to other Product Leaders.

An ineffective product manager:

·        Has a backlog that is not prioritized, or only prioritized based on gut feel.

·        Brings stories to sprint planning that the development team has not seen.

·        Is constantly thinking about “the next sprint”.

·        Frequently overpromises.  Doesn’t understand their development capacity.

·        Doesn’t re-verify their requirements and designs with stakeholders before substantially beginning work.

·        Uses internal business stakeholders as their primary source of what we should be doing next.

·        Does not consider market/client adoption and implications of their product decisions on other departments.

·        Is not familiar with the term no.

·        Timid.  Avoids complex or difficult projects because development says “they are too hard”.

·        Doesn’t think about how their solution is built.

·        Doesn’t allow their development team to add items to the backlog or contribute to their acceptance criteria.

A good product manager has these traits:

·        Clear.  Always begins with a thorough understanding of customer success.

·        Authoritative. Recognized as a thought leader within the company.

·        Confident. Know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.

·        Inquisitive. Asks critical questions about the solution development has chosen, particularly with regards to scope, edge cases, “what if” scenarios, etc.  And in particular, will this solution truly meet their customer’s needs.

·        Understands that not every stakeholder’s opinion is created equal.

·        Can clearly articulate their own product strategy without using jargon.  Can clearly articulate the strategy of all of their primary market competition in 3-5 words.

·        Doesn’t get rattled when senior executive names are mentioned with relation to a contract or project, and instead prefers to deal with market facts.

·        Wants to understand the basics about what kind of technical decisions are being made about their product solution.

A good product manager has these behaviors:

·        Understands that customers often don’t know what they want, even if they are telling you what they want.  Focus on the market pains and try to understand how they define success.

·        Doesn’t take it personally if a customer or stakeholder criticizes their product. The last thing a good product manager wants to do is discourage those who are passionate about the product they are building from giving honest and open feedback.

·        Reviews the entire backlog from in priority order with their development team regularly.

·        Regularly provides an opportunity for their development team and other stakeholders to improve acceptance criteria.

·        Has a solid understanding of their team’s capacity.  Goes into a sprint planning meeting with enough stories to stretch their teams.

·        Keeps up on competition, recognizes where our strengths and weaknesses are, and how to position our product in the best light.

·        Has a regular way to informally validate and get feedback on priorities from those in the market.

·        Prioritizes their backlog based on a system that they has been tested over time which weighs the various needs of the market, financial, business, technology, etc. This allows a Product Manager to have a baseline prioritization for guidance, while still allowing you to reorder items if needed.

·        Visits or speaks with customers regularly.

·        Already has their themes mapped out for the next 3-4 sprints.

A great product manager has these traits:

·        Humble.  Not afraid to be wrong.  Recognizes when they need help.

·        Comfortable with conflict.  Can easily navigate an upset customer or stakeholder by highlighting your common goals. Not afraid of delivering the tough message, if it’s the right one.

·        Knows that what users, prospects or customers tell you can’t be trusted, only what they do.

·        Is a compelling speaker and writer.

·        If the customer isn’t buying, growing, or improving, knows it is their job to figure out why.

·        Can “see around corners.”

·        Constantly builds alliances with stakeholders and customers because they know they will need that trusted relationship later on.

·        Can understand the technical tradeoffs their teams are thinking about and can provide them with long-term business impacts of their decisions.

·        Can just as easily evaluate what is missing or unstated as what is stated or easily apparent.

·        Sweats the details.  A great product manager understands that even sometimes small uncommunicated details can derail a major initiative.

·        Is well-networked.  Knows who the thought leaders in their space are, and is always developing new relationships.

A great product manager has these behaviors:

·        Dives headfirst into tricky areas and is able to think clearly even when evaluating or scoping a complex initiative.  Regularly creates order out of chaos.

·        Constantly analyzes the results of their team’s efforts with the market directly and with stakeholders.  Regularly brings this kind of information back to the team and the broader organization.

·        Doesn’t make themselves indispensable for advice or guidance.  Constantly teaching their team to see things as they do, so that they can act independently and proactively.  True acceleration comes from the actions of the entire team and not just one individual.

·        Understands that our purpose is not to build software, but to find ways to make our customers successful.  More software is often not the answer.  

·        Has a clear understanding of the market problems that they are trying to solve, and regularly brings this list of market problems to development in order to generate creative solutions that go beyond “what your stakeholder told you to do” or “what the competition is doing”.

·        Not afraid to reject a feature if the team didn’t do their best or complete the project as requested.

·        Giving and helpful.  Not too busy to have time to assist others who are struggling.

·        Is recognized as a thought leader within their industry, not just within the company. Is regularly sought out by other experts within their industry for advice on their subject matter expertise.

·        Discusses their backlog openly with business stakeholders, allowing them to see priority and have an informed discussion about constraints, capacity and decision-making tradeoffs.

·        Understands that there is no such thing as perfect software.

·        Reserves time to dream with their team.

·        Constantly trying to simplify and reduce complexity, features, or products under management if they are not relevant to the market anymore.  Great product management is sometimes about creative destruction.

#productmanagement

[rickwatson]

Bloomberg Interview with Betty Liu

#bloomberg #video

[rickwatson]

Google, My Sick Dog, Barnes & Noble and Bloomberg TV

My dog was sick (again!) in the middle of the night.  Jennifer was great and took her out! I had an interview this morning.  Google trying to strike at Amazon.  Drama on a Friday!  Let's get to it.

Big headline: Google continues to go after Amazon in a big way with their new partnership with Barnes & Noble.  This morning I appeared on Bloomberg's In the Loop segment with Betty Liu (@BettyInTheLoop) to talk about their new initiatives.

Some links about this:

Google & B&N unite to take on Amazon (NY Times)

Amazon has advantage over Google / B&N (ZDNet)

Small headline:

Google is losing share of retail searches to Amazon.  In some general merchandise categories, Amazon is up to 20% of "where I search first" in the United States.  That may not seem like a lot, but it's huge progress for Amazon.

For Barnes & Noble this is a no-brainer.  Why not try to get more sales to transfer from online to the stores?

A few underlying trends.  Mobile is an angle here.  If you search for a book on your tablet or phone, Google knows where you are and you want immediate gratification.  Amazon has an advantage in books but not all segments of books are heading digital as quickly.  To give you some idea, here are some industry stats.  In cookbooks for instance, 60% of people prefer physical to 15% digital.  Not sure what the other 25% prefer, perhaps Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  Romance and thriller is another story, however :-)

What It's Like Going on Bloomberg:

Nerve-wracking in general!  I've done 3 segments now, all for different Bloomberg programs (Surveillance, West, and In the Loop).

A few points:

It's always iive.

I'm generally called only a day or two before the show runs.

Usually I get about a sentence of information regarding the topic.  That's it.  For today's program on Google, I got a 20 minute call yesterday by Paris @ Bloomberg and felt super-prepared!  Thanks Paris!

I arrive about 30 minutes before the program. Make-up happens 10 minutes before.  3 minutes before, I get mic'ed up, and I sit down with the anchor (if they are in the studio) about 2 minutes before live airtime.

  That's it.  In one, I was sitting around a desk with 4 other people.  In another, I was the only person in the studio staring at a camera.  This morning, I was sitting directly across from the host, Betty Liu.

I've always enjoyed speaking so it's a fun experience.

Happy Friday!

[rickwatson]

Actually it sounds like Product Ads, not Marketplace here.  The main difference being the purchases happen on the retailer's site like an affiliate or CPC model.

The headline could easily read:  retail fashion companies paying Amazon fee to remove counterfeit merchandise.... since the brand owner being on Amazon often means they get more control over what's going on there.

Maybe I'm wrong?

[rickwatson]

On bloombergtv @bsurveillance this morning ... It was a lot of fun

#amazon bloomberg ecommerce retail q4

[rickwatson]

Recently I got the opportunity to create a guest blog post for Amazon's Webstore blog.

3 Reasons Your ECommerce Strategy is Stuck in Neutral 

This post is really about trying to diagnose a couple of reasons why your eCommerce site's revenue performance is not going like you think it should be.

This could become something I do more regularly so watch this space...

#ecommerce #strategy

[rickwatson]

Back in the Saddle

Well that was an interesting 6 months!  It feels that long since I’ve popped my head up here. If you’ve followed me, here’s what I’ve been up to recently.... perhaps in the style you’re used to from me. That is to say, long-winded? 1 - I’ve moved on from Barnes & Noble’s ECommerce team. I moved to NY in part for a greater pool of opportunities and Barnes & Noble was a great option at the time I moved.  Serving as GM of their Marketplace initiative taught me a lot about many different new things:

Leading large cross-functional teams.

Being the place where the “buck stops”.

Seeing how a large retailer works from the inside.

Getting a complete picture about how an online marketplace works.

Learning more about working inside of a larger company.

I decided to move on to a different type of challenge, but having gained a lot in the process.  My best wishes to the B&N team as they continue to execute on all their digital initiatives. 2 - I’ve gotten divorced. After 12 years of marriage, I’ve recently gotten divorced.  It’s one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make and feel like I’ve grown a lot in the process. This was an especially tough decision for me having grown up Catholic, and having such great parents that are still together, combined with grandparents that had been together 50+ years as fantastic role models. No one goes into any marriage expecting it to end, least of all me.  I tend to think I can fix any situation but ultimately decided that I had to move on with my life. Getting used to this single thing has been a great new experience as well -- it’s going well so far and I’m dating a great girl.  Looking forward to a lot of new experiences.   3 - I’m still in New York! This may seem like a surprise but given the divorce, I wasn’t tied to any particular location and seriously considered moving to the San Francisco Bay area as part of looking for a new job. I expect to be in New York for a long while now, where a long while for me means that I’m prepared to be here 10 years.  It’s kind of my default horizon. I’m very happy with my decision to move to New York, am starting to develop a good network of friends, and it’s safe to say there will always be a lot of opportunity here. From my reckoning, the ECommerce and technology market in New York is about 2-3x smaller than the San Francisco Bay area, but it’s also pretty clear to me that in terms of “opportunity pools for ECommerce”, NY is #2 in the United States.  That’s a pretty good place to be. And it’s on the rise.  NY has not always been known for technology firms and Ecommerce -- instead being known more for finance, fashion, and advertising.  Technology and ecommerce is growing rapidly in NY, however.  It was about 3 years ago I noticed a definite explosion of startups in the NY area that wasn’t as noticeable even 5 years ago. It’s one of the things I liked when I first moved to the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina in 1998, but a lot of company density has migrated to Pharma and Biotech away from Technology firms -- of course the old standbys like SAS, IBM/Lenovo continue to grow.  NC is still a great area of the country with a fantastic quality of life. 4 - I’ve joined Merchantry! What’s that?  It’s a startup based in New York that builds online marketplace software for retailers and media companies. Well, I can’t seem to get Marketplaces off the brain.  Let’s recap:

Was with ChannelAdvisor for 10+ years, which helps retailers connect to online marketplaces.

Launched the expanded Barnes & Noble Marketplace.

Now I’m VP Operations for Merchantry.  Operations is a bit of a catch-all title but essentially it means delivering on what the company promises and making sure the company is doing all the right things as we scale the business.  It’s a fun role for me since at Barnes & Noble I was an operationally-oriented GM.

It's really a lot of fun seeing a marketplace business from so many angles.

RE: Merchantry.... Tommaso Trionfi, the CEO there is a great guy I’ve known for a number of years now and made the transition a no-brainer.  The team is energetic, very experienced with marketplaces, and we’re starting to get traction in a developing market. All the usual startup caveats apply but all the indicators are headed in the right direction meaning it should be a fun ride.  Truly looking forward to this.

If you are one of the literally dozens of people that I talked with during my recent job search, I cannot thank you enough.

5 - My speaking schedule has picked up. Being at a major retailer makes it easier to kickstart speaking opportunities.  In the retail industry, retailers are most interested in most hearing from other retailers. Earlier this year, I spoke at ETail West in Palm Springs, as well as at the E-Commerce Summit in Barcelona.   Last month, I spoke at a panel in NY hosted by J.H. Cohn about ECommerce investments and strategy. Last week, I hosted a roundtable at Shop.org 2012 about Launching an Online Marketplace, co-hosted with Merchantry customer Jerome Mercier, CEO of BorderLinx, which recently launched a new Marketplace called OneWorldAvenue focused on helping international markets get better access to mainstream US/UK brands.  They are always looking for new suppliers so check it out particularly if you are a high-end brand -- they’ve signed some interesting co-marketing deals with major credit card companies. In the next few months, things seem to pick up even more.

September 29: I’m speaking at Product Camp NYC on ECommerce Strategy.  It’s the same topic as my ETail West presentation.

October 5-6: I’m speaking at the I.C.E. EBusiness Conference.  A good friend of mine, my boy John Lawson @ ColderICE, is putting on a great show primarily directed at small to mid-sized eCommerce maniacs.  Should be a fun time.  Still figuring out what I will speak about here :-)

October 24th: I’m speaking at a Danish ECommerce Conference and Exhibition in Copenhagen, Denmark about running a Third-Party Marketplace.  I got the speaking invitation based on my talk in Barcelona where the event organizers happened to listen in on my presentation.  I don’t believe I’ve ever been to Copenhagen.

Whew -- as I said it's been an interesting and productive 6 months. And it definitely explains why my time has gotten shorter in terms of blogging, tweeting, LinkedIning, etc.

- Rick

[rickwatson]

Mixing up my blogging research

An attachment set for a mixer I don't own.

Well heck.  Blogging is becoming expensive.  

About a month or so ago I wrote an entry about eBay search where I said that on Kitchenaid.com there were 85 results for mixers and on eBay there were thousands... well apparently as part of that research I put a mixer attachment in a shopping cart at Amazon.  Then I went back there to buy something else (for real) and bought it at the same time without realizing it.

Grr.  $50 I'll never get back.  Probably donate it someplace or give it to a friend -- I don't think I've ever returned a single item online.  Hassle.

This leads me to wonder what % of online purchases are accidental.  I've prevented myself at the last second from doing this once or twice before, so it must happen to others as well?

I don't think I've ever actually used a mixer.

#blogging

[rickwatson]

The New eBay As Retail Leader, not Secondary Market

One of the reasons I enjoy blogging is I really enjoy thought experiments on businesses.  This is another one of those.  I choose eBay/Amazon a lot because they are both commerce leaders, visible/transparent, and so they set the standard in some ways for the industry.

One of these kids is doing his own thing, come on can you tell which one?

The proposal: 

The eBay.com site and brand should become mainline retail as the primary focus and optimize around that.  Liquidations and collectibles would be relegated to a sub-brand and separate experience (much like an offline retail company might do -- think "Ann Taylor" and "Ann Taylor Loft", there are literally hundreds of examples.)

Backstory:

On eBay, Auctions are growing significantly slower than the rest of the site.  This quarter they were up but historically they have been declining.  They are still shrinking as a % of total which is all that matters.  Top-Rated Sellers % of GMV is climbing > 50% levels and will likely continue to climb.

eBay Express: It didn't wear well.

Long ago, eBay tried to appeal to convenience-oriented buyers by introducing a new brand -- called eBay Express -- but it had all manner of issues:

eBay brand tried to retain auction and add a convenience meaning.  Tough for someone to consider a high-end offering from a low-end provider.

"Express" moniker was too cute and really wasn't so Express given the state of eBay's old shopping "cart", which eBay has since fixed.

eBay had lost a fair bit of mojo at this point / wasn't listening -- so even their good ideas weren't working.

This proposal concerns pulling a "Reverse Express", in some ways.  Elevate the primary eBay brand - continue to raise its quality bar - and create an off-brand for secondary-market items.

The argument against something like this is some of Jack Trout's classic marketing advice -- once a brand occupies a place in your mind it's virtually impossible to move.

Super-smart.

Good advice for sure in the short term, but I feel that patience has proven this incorrect.  Amazon (among others -- but they are the most visible in retail) has shown that something which occupied ONLY a books place in a consumer's mind can later become synonymous with "store".

You need a decade, but it can be done.  eBay can and should have this kind of patience.  If it doesn't, they've already lost Amazon's strategic long-term chess game anyway.

At least partially, eBay has been executing against this strategy already in several ways.  Let's project it out further, however.

But not this way.

How might it work?

Listing-focused search would be present under something like collectibles.ebay.com or liquidations.ebay.com only.

The "new eBay" could be mostly mainline items.  eBay as a brand would simply mean "mall", or perhaps even better: "retail, wherever it is".

Search experience on eBay becomes 90%+ catalog focused, not listing-focused.

Product pages (rather than listing pages) dominate, and link out to "replacement or alternatives" as well which can cross-link to liquidations/treasures since that is a legitimate decisionmaking point.  The time to show the average consumer listings is after you know what product you want, not before.  This point is so critical, I'll probably devote an entire post to it at some time.

Listings could be collapsed somewhat to only allow unique condition/seller combinations for the same product.  Multiple listings would just be collapsed into single multi-quantity item from the seller.

Listing fees go away.  However, a new fee source can emerge more clearly: a search-engine marketing model rather than an insertion model.  Listing fees going away solves a lot of problems for eBay.  Too many to detail here.

Listings could still exist (insofar as a listing is really a UPC/condition/seller combination) but only surfaced under products on the main eBay site.

Remove any "extra" fees for Buy It Now.  How does this help buyers for a product not to be able to be bought immediately?  This reminds of me of how eBay used to charge for image fees.

For certain types of buyers, the default eBay.com search could perhaps default to listings-oriented search.  eBay knows their buying habits, and clustering and personalization technology has advanced far enough.

I even think the eBay logo could use a slight tweak.  The brand image of the logo reflects, in some ways, "clutter" with letters overlapping in different colors.  The logo is iconic at this point, but the message is subtle but clear.  The problem with logo changes is that they are expensive and don't add consumer value, so no need to do this, but thought I would mention it in the event anyone out there had thoughts about this. 

I believe that this combination would keep eBay on a trajectory to stay relevant in commerce, but avoid being seen as simply "copying Amazon" - a frequent barb.  There is a lot of innovation to be had in the above areas.  (And if you think Amazon is doing everything right, then you haven't checked Amazon's own search engine lately.  I can and probably will fill several posts in the future about that.)

What would the benefits be?

Liquidations, collectibles and treasures could be given an optimized experience under their own sub-domain.

Main eBay domain gets more clarity.  Focus on products.

Better buyer experience in search.

More product pages.  Host of benefits here.  

Potentially new SEM-based revenue stream.  Host of opportunities here.

Remove clumsy listing fee model.  Value is extracted entirely too early.

Wrap-up

When John Donahoe came into eBay, it's clear he knew what he was getting into.  He wisely gave himself a 3yr buffer period (something few new CEOs do for some reason -- it's so smart in a public company [see: Bartz, Thompson for counter-examples], even if you don't need it, there are almost no downsides.  The children on Wall Street learn to calm down if you keep reinforcing the message).  But he inherited a hairball with multiple strands.

eBay as a brand had a declining trust proposition.

More and more people were choosing Amazon first.

eBay's technology team and platforms were not modern and aggressive enough any longer (one of the games I like to play is pick a successful company in the Valley, and greater than 50% of the time you will find former eBayers or Paypalers there, and doing well).  The exodus of talent during the mid-late Whitman era after the stock burst was nothing short of breathtaking.  "Elevating technology" is a new watchword at eBay you never heard in the past.

Listings are part of what make eBay "unique", but this uniqueness doesn't always add consumer value.  Sometimes unique is just different.

... and more.

John Lawson: Georgia on his mind.  Probably would miss listings.

You probably need to address the "secondary market" brand if you are going to evolve the company.  It's critical to start this journey.  Right now they are keeping the exisitng brand, but are evolving the experience to be more trusted (via Top-Rated Sellers primarily).  Once that experience sinks in, however, the brand will need to "flip" as well.

And by "flip" I mean eBay's meaning becomes Retail, instead of secondary market.  eBay doesn't need to jettison it's secondary market, but re-label it to reflect the new focus of the site.

Make sense?  Crazy?  Your comments welcome as always.

#ebay #amazon #ecommerce

[rickwatson]

Ricky Christina Barcelona? Woody Allen Does Marketplaces

Ok I'm headed to Barcelona and it should be a lot of fun.

Gaudi.  All that. 

Why does an ECommerce nut get to go to Barcelona?  Well to talk about Marketplaces of course!

Conference: E-Commerce Summit 2012 Barcelona

Dates: June 4-6, 2012 (soon!)

Topic: Is Running a Marketplace Right for Me?

A topic near to my heart.  The theme of the conference is primarily European retailers getting to hear what's going on in the United States.  I have the Marketplace session. It's obviously a trend.  I've been on both sides of the fence -- helping retailers succeed on Marketplaces, as well as building a Marketplace at Barnes & Noble.

The things I'll talk about -- I've not seen them before, and you will likely never hear again.  Not in this detail.

If you've never heard me speak before -- I'm pretty transparent.  I will lay out step by step my decision points coming into Barnes & Noble, what we considered, why we did it, how we did it, and most importantly if you're a large retailer: does it make sense for you to do the same thing?

My presentation is laid out in my head already, but if you have any questions in particular you'd like me to answer, let me know and I'll include them.  After the conference, I'm happy to post the slides to Slideshare.

Folks that follow me in Europe?  Feel free to drop by -- I'll be in Barcelona all week so would love to catch up.

Thanks!

- Rick

#ecommerce #marketplace #speaking #speaker #conference

[rickwatson]

Obviously Google has had its Commerce Search for a while but this is a clear signal that Amazon is entering the game.

As far as eBay is concerned, they might need to pay attention here.  X.Commerce is designed to be this fabric for all these commerce components.  I did a search for "X.Commerce" and "Search" and came up empty (on Google, naturally).

If eBay's strategy is Magento that's one thing, but having a cloud strategy gives Amazon a decided advantage.  Pretty soon (within months) someone will build a Magneto plugin which uses CloudSearch.  

Probably next up is a more formal taxonomy service, built on top of any number of Amazon's existing database solutions.

See where this is headed?  Build the components first (capture developers) and then stack them together later on (integrators/ISVs).

#ecommerce amazon google search x.commerce

[rickwatson]

Know Why It Failed

"Oh that, idea? We've done that before 5 years ago!  Let me save you some time."

Being a leader is tough.  Not only do you have to pick a good idea, but you have to get the execution right.  It struck me the other day that many times when people move onto a new idea, org structure, whatever, they don't have a clear picture of why the old one was not appropriate other than:

It was done by my predecessor.

There are a whole set of reasons why something fails, and only by getting the most important ones right can you succeed.

Wrong idea

Wrong rollout to org

Wrong message

Wrong funding

Wrong market

Wrong follow-on effort

Wrong time

Wrong leader

Wrong team

Wrong company

Wrong alignment between groups

Wrong contributor

Wrong process

Wrong metrics

Wrong goals

Wrong tweaks in response to feedback

There are many more than this.

Which ones are most important to you?  To success of your effort?

Often, the  job of a leader is to take a failed idea - one that no one thinks will work - and with the right root cause analysis, tweak one or all of these and have it succeed.

Ever wonder what Jeff Bezos means when he says "Stubborn on vision, flexible on details?"  

This is it.

#leadership #ideas #execution

[rickwatson]

Paypal's Recent Changes and Does Your Business Have a Fresh Pair of Eyes?

Are your eyes tired?  Too focused on building new things to see the pile of stuff building up in the corner?

Paypal has recently rolled out some new messaging and tiers around its products, and it hit me that the fact they are doing this is a really good external indicator for Paypal.

The reason is that it shows Paypal is looking at their business with a fresh pair of eyes.

Seems simple, but it's not.  Forever, Paypal has been a jumble of confusing terms.  Paypal Websites Payment Pro.  Paypal Express Checkout.  Paypal Direct Payment.  Paypal Payments Pro.

And this is barely counting all the things that were carried over from the Verisign acquisition.  Gems like Payflow Pro and Payflow Link.

What if they wanted to add new features to this?  Just throw another one on the jumbled mess of names?  How do you even begin to speak about this to the market?

Answer these questions:

When's the last time you killed a product?  A feature?

How many products and features have you added in the last year?

List out your most frequently used pages or features, and write down when they were built.  They haven't been redesigned since then, have they?  Are you sure your users are exactly the same?

Engineers call this refactoring.  And this is Paypal doing it to their product lines.

#paypal #product management #business

[rickwatson]

Why eBay's Search Falls Down - And What Can Be Done About It

Close your eyes.

Remember the first time you used Google?  That 'a-ha' moment when you felt that someone understood what sort of information was truly important to you?

If search queries are the database of intentions/wants/desires, then search results are perhaps the database of understanding.  

It's the way for a website to say, "I hear you".  

The fact that search results can inspire empathy in users is significant in the world of ECommerce -- which supposedly represents the fulfillment of user needs/wants.  If an ECommerce company has a search problem, they have a pretty major business concern -- which brings us to today's topic:

eBay Search.

eBay has a tough job on its hands.  It has a search domain on the scale of someone like Google.  Its business model, inventory source,  and product relationships are completely unique in the industry.

As I thought about eBay's options to improve that experience, I wanted to consider two paths in particular:  one is to keep working and improving what they have, and the other is outsourcing.

Option One - Continue to Innovate In-House

eBay continues to try to move away from being a flea market.  In my opinion, a major frontier in this initiative needs to be their search engine.  Just because you are trying to be the largest "secondary market", doesn't mean you need to have search results that look unprofessional.  

What might that look like?  In order to do that, you need to define what the eBay search gaps are and/or what they could do about it.

1 - Fixing eBay Item Titles

eBay titles are below par compared to normal ECommerce.  And fixing several issues associated with them would take no more than 30 minutes of programming.  What do I mean?

a - Everyone has special abbreviations that only make sense on eBay (e.g. NWT, NIB etc).  Stop that.  Filter it out.  What "makes sense to eBay buyers" make no sense to the broader market.  It limits growth.  

b - The case (by that I mean capitalization) OF SOME LISTINGS IS ALL UPPERCASE some are all lowercase AND Some Are Mixed.  This is Very Hard ON the EYES IN A SEARCH ENGINE RESULTS PAGE.  Get it?  The correct answer is to "Proper Case All Titles".  Can you name a single other major commerce-oriented website -- outside of Craigslist -- which has a situation like this?  The fact that Craigslist is even who I jump to gives you a sense of why you need to solve this.

c - On branded items, many sellers use terms like "Genuine" in their titles.  eBay should strip that.  It devalues the experience and cast doubt on other items.  If an item isn't genuine, it needs to be off the site.  

d - Strip all punctuation in titles.  Many eBay titles have exclamation points.  This has no place in any kind of ECommerce.  

e - And I'm sure even eBay employees will jump up and down by joining me in stripping "L@@K" out of all titles.  120,000 items have this little gem in there.

2 - More Catalog matching... Much More...

Entirely too few items match to a catalog in results.  eBay needs to continue to invest significantly in SKU-matching technology.  

What do you mean "catalog/SKU"?  Here's an example.

If I search for "KitchenAid mixer" on eBay, it returns 3,000+ results.  If I search on KitchenAid.com it returns 85 results.  

85!

Clearly there are not 3,000 unique mixers in the world but no grouping of results by model makes buyers work MUCH harder.  eBay's search is optimized to support treasure-hunting, not decision-making.

eBay created a simplified search for iPads and several other popular products years ago.  At this point there's no reason not to apply it everywhere.  Not if they are serious about fixing search.  Just take the example of books for a moment.  Every book since 1973 has an ISBN.  Yet search on a recent book, and they are all unique snowflakes.

The byproduct of this suggestion and suggestion #1 (fixing titles) is that the seller would have a lot less control over their titles.  Or in some cases, no control at all.  But I think that could be a good thing for buyers.

A lot of these changes are simple, testable, and seem like they could help improve the buyer experience.  

3 - Returns policy confusion

Returns policy front and center in search results? Is this really needed?  I understand the intent but this just reminds people that this is somewhat of a yard sale.  Some people have 30 day returns, others have no return policy.  And these are all mashed-up together in the same set of search results, each different than the next.

No return policy?  Again, that makes sense for liquidation but not for mainline items.  

Too much risk disclosure up front just reinforces the fact that you can't trust what's going on.  It undermines eBay's own initiatives like eBay Buyer Protection.  In general, a sweep needs to be done through the site for all sorts of unconscious indicators to buyers that "the items on this site may not be a good a deal as you think they are".

4 - Search results trying to serve too many masters

One challenge with eBay's search engine is that it's trying to serve too many masters in one search results format.  Certain types of buyers don't see one format, and other types another.  Everyone sees Fixed Price, Auctions, etc., all thrown together.

One idea how to solve this might take the form of separating collectibles and liquidation auctions from UPC/catalog items in search.

This could take the place of personalization technology.  Over time, eBay should be able to learn who is interested in collectibles and yard-sale liquidation and who is not.  Those people should get a different set of search results -- a different experience.

The buying experience is definitely unique for the "treasure seeker" versus the normal person.  eBay in the past has called these "normal people" Convenience-Oriented Buyers.  This requires more analysis.  More than I have time for in this post, but I feel there are some unexplored avenues of personalization.

There are obviously other things that could be worked on, but even these I feel could make a big impact.  Now let's consider what other options eBay has.

Option Two - License Google technology.  

The other option to developing everything in-house is of course, some kind of partnership with a major search provider.

This seems obvious, but needs more consideration than you would think.  However, at the same time: seriously, why not?  [As an aside, "Why not?" is perhaps one of my favorite questions in life - usually preceded by the statement "HERE'S a wacky idea".]  

In the analysis below I swap Google and Bing because they are really the only players near the top of the field at the moment, despite Bing being a distant second.

Let's start with the simple facts:

Google is not a retailer, and neither is eBay.  There is perhaps tension between them over payments and local commerce, but there is also room for partnership.  The Internet space is messy these days in terms of frenemies.

eBay has a lot of cash.

Google has the best search technology in the world.

eBay's search engine is not best in class in eCommerce.

eBay has unique search challenges that no other company in the world has.  Namely: auctions, a highly unstructured catalog, and degree of update frequency from its vendors that I'm certain is in the top 0.01% of all sites worldwide.

At current pace, even Microsoft could invest more than $40B (and likely much more than this) in Bing over the next decade.  That's the price of entry for consumer expectations of Search of the distant-second player in the market. [source: Microsoft lost $1B/quarter to Bing last year].  No way they will continue that pace (investors will never allow it), but it gives you an idea of the scale that eBay is up against when tackling search.

Buyers don't care if eBay owns its own search technology, they just care that it works.

Now we can get to speculation:

Google and Bing would likely compete for eBay's business if it were up for bid.

Measured in terms of talent and dollars required over the next decade, using someone else's "search framework" would likely be cheaper.

Let's say $40B is the number you need to invest over the next decade to meet consumer search expectations and be the top ECommerce player (this discussion is pointless if you are not trying to do that).  Why chase this unless you plan on competing with Google Commerce Search?  

If you think about what search looks like 10 years from now, is eBay prepared to remain in that game?  

If not, why not start sooner rather than later exploring other options?  Even if you don't use it as an out of the box solution [eBay is too complex for that], why not have Google provide you a "search engine framework" that you can then build on top of.  That way you can take advantage of Google improvements as well as your own.

Custom BD deal? Yes.  But these are two large companies and a custom strategic partnership could make sense.  At least on the whiteboard.

Benefits for Google:

1 - More ad real estate and scale.

2 - More use cases and traffic through their engine.

3 - Google is motivated to see that Amazon doesn't run away with Commerce.

Benefits for eBay:

1 - Take advantage of the gold standard technology.

2 - Lower R&D effort.  Not zero, but less perhaps by half.

3 - eBay is motivated to make sure that Amazon does not run away with Commerce.

Despite the whiteboard benefits, there are simply enormous risks with this approach (no particular order):

eBay is tremendously more dynamic than the average website, as well as the whole "listing" concept, which could scuttle the whole idea.  However, why not incentivize Google to extend their best in breed engine rather than re-build the entire stack from scratch yourself?  Put those Google PhDs to work.  Think about it, even Apple OS X is just a re-skin of BSD.  And you would think their own operating system core would be important to Apple.  It's not.  It's about the experience.

Google's Commerce aspirations.  That makes Bing a better fit honestly.  Same difference.  They are also committed to throwing billions of dollars against search in the next decade.  Also, they haven't mangled their search engine with +1s. :-)

Partnerships between major companies never seem to work for more than a couple of years.  Alignment of incentives is the primary reason, but once you get near the top 5 companies in the world, turf wars become more inevitable because the number of lucrative domains to play in shrinks.

Despite the risks, still worth a conversation?  Sounds like it to me.

The other option that occurs to me in this evaluation of alternatives is for Microsoft to spinout Bing and for eBay to acquire it.  Although some Microsoft investors would love this [it stops the bleeding], I doubt it would happen because Ballmer is still scared as hell of missing the Google opportunity to begin with. 

The partnership road is harder, but.... as they say in New York... "I know a guy".

Wrapping Up: Why This Is Important for eBay

It's simple really.  Clean and easy to navigate search results communicate professionalism.  Professionalism reduces buyer uneasiness.  Reduced buyer uneasiness lowers perceived risk in the buyer's mind.

If you are asking the buyer to do work, it means that mentally they discount how much their time is worth from your prices.  I will spend all day hunting at a promising garage sale if I can get a huge discount on an expensive item.

But if my discount goes down, then I want the transaction to be more convenient.  Particularly if part of the work I'm doing is removing risk from my own transaction -- the risk of getting the wrong thing -- which is part of what I'm doing when paging through 3,000 mixer results.

My contention is that if you make things more convenient for the buyer at lower risk (aka higher trust), buyers will pay higher prices for the same item.  

And isn't that part of what building a great brand is all about?  

So what should they do?

Based on all this, it's probably simpler/easier for them to keep plugging away provided they are working in the right direction.  The thing that worries me overall is that some of these changes could be so simple, that the fact they haven't been done yet means they are purposeful.  Which means you don't have an technical problem (something's broken), you just have a different vision than I do (this is how they want it to work) or you have other things to work on (bigger fish to fry).

However, even given the benefit of the doubt (bigger fish to fry) ... if these are useful ideas, it doesn't get you off the hook.

  It gets to an even larger question -- how long will it take eBay to take to produce best in class ECommerce search results?  And if/when it gets there, will the industry have moved on again?

Given the usage of search on any ECommerce site, I feel this is an important question.

There's more, of course!  What other things could eBay do to help search?

Or am I just off-base altogether?

#ebay #ecommerce #search #amazon #google #bing #microsoft

[rickwatson]

In Search of the Perfect Transaction, and 4 Other Best Practices for Marketplaces

Yesterday with the help of Melissa Campanelli from  Retail Online Integration and Clark Hale Monsoon Commerce, I delivered a part of presentation to introduce people to online Marketplaces.  Many in the audience were not even familiar with what a Marketplace was, so this webinar served as a way to introduce the idea, and provide some guidance on what expectations are for marketplace sellers.

Really there were 3 parts to my slides:

An overview of what a marketplace is, why they even exist to begin with, and who the major players are.

5 Marketplace Worst Practices.

5 Marketplace Best Practices.

In particular, some of the practices I mention I've never seen talked about in other presentations.  Others are relatively obvious or straightforward if you're in the industry, but not as clear if you're just starting out and wondering what to focus on.  

I tried to be as transparent as possible, in particular about the ways Marketplaces evaluate the transactions between buyers and sellers.

Really, what's the point of hiding?  

Experienced retailers know what is going on.  Marketplaces know what they are doing, can't we just be honest?  It truly will not help or hurt the "bad guys" trying to defraud the system because eventually they are found anyway unless someone is asleep at the switch.  

Besides there are always a few extra things that don't fit into my list of 5 that will keep people guessing!

On the topic of best practices, my #1 tip is to seek what I call "Perfect" transactions.  At the Marketplace I run for Barnes & Noble I'm building up internal metrics to track all sellers according to this metric, and over time want to publish this directly to sellers on a regular basis.

A perfect transaction is one without any issues.  An issue can be any one of the following, but of course some of these might be weighted more highly than others.  Any one of these means the transaction is not perfect, to some degree:

An order where the buyer has rated the transaction a 1 or a 2 (lowest).

An order that the seller had to cancel - any reason.

An order that the seller had to refund part or all of.

An order where the buyer has to contact the seller about an order.

An order where the seller provided tracking and it did not arrive within a certain period of time or did not arrive at the correct location.

Perfect transactions can become a trackable ratio across a user base and give an illuminating performance picture.

Perfect means buyer's experience is completely seamless.  Click, ship, receive.  

That is the ideal.  It's not that I want sellers not to refund buyers or communicate because they are worried about perfection, it's more that given the choice between a seller who has perfect transactions and one that has to refund buyers due to mistakes or an improperly described item, you choose the seller with perfect transactions.

I've provided my portion of the slides via SlideShare below:

5 Marketplace Best Practices Webinar

View more PowerPoint from Rick Watson

#ebay #amazon #buy #barnes & noble #marketplace