B2B/B2C online strategy and enterprise eBusiness blog

This month we launched an industry first: we have built a custom product configurator API. We have teamed with American Blinds, the largest online retailer of window treatments, to put the API in production with the launch of our previously-mentioned custom draperies program.

The B2B benefit

The API allows American Blinds to effectively “shake hands” with our product configurator enabling online ordering of custom draperies from Levolor without having to do any product programming. This enables us as the manufacturer to focus on effectively managing the hundreds of billions of configuration possibilities with our custom product lines while American Blinds focuses on the marketing of the products to their consumers — essentially the best of both worlds.

Here are screen shots of the experience:

The American Blinds Curtains & Draperies landing page:

The Levolor Draperies landing page on AmericanBlinds.com:

Now entering the Levolor.com product configurator:

The completed configuration passed back to the American Blinds shopping cart via the API:

The American Blinds checkout process with a Levolor configured product sent via the API:

The B2C benefit

The benefit to consumers is a seamless experience as they are passed unknowingly from server-to-server with no interruption in navigation. To them, it is like picking up another product sample book in the store. At the time of purchase, regardless of products they have in their cart, they still go through the same checkout line for a completely seamless purchasing experience.

Apple just gets it. Today they announced the iPhone 3G, a thinner, faster, and more affordable iPhone. I continue to be fascinated by how they take difficult or time-consuming processes and make them easy. Take for example MobileMe.

How will Plaxo respond to MobileMe?

As a die-hard Plaxo user, MobileMe seems to be a fairly significant threat to Plaxo. In the wake of Comcast’s recent purchase of Plaxo, I would imagine Plaxo will be find itself in a difficult position to continue innovating as it works through the transition to Comcast ownership and business processes.

Apple has quite simply leap-frogged Plaxo in features and functionality that I currently pay $60/year for with Plaxo: Address book and calendar syncing. Plaxo also has other bells and whistles such as contact “networking” features (a la LinkedIn) and Plaxo Pulse (a la Friendster — essentially a “life stream” of your data)…neither of which I pay the yearly fee for. Calendar and contact syncing is where the value is for me.

MobileMe goes beyond address & calendar syncing

Most importantly, MobileMe will also sync email, photos, and files. As I hop between an enterprise BlackBerry, an iMac at home, and a MacBook Pro for work (running VMWare so I can play nicely in the Windows world), the MobileMe synchronization is really the best of everything. No matter which environment I’m in, I’ll have access to my most frequently-used data.

MobileMe could be the ticket

While I’m not about to switch email addresses, the photo and file syncing are very nice add-ons for the $99/year fee with 20GB of storage. Google’s Picasa photo hosting only provides 2GB of storage (it’s free, though) and DropBox (for file sharing) is still in its infancy. Is this enough to convince me to buy an iPhone? Only if it’ll work with Enterprise email. MobileMe however looks to be the ticket when it comes out (with or without an iPhone). I’ll be testing the 60-day trial for sure.

After many months of site development and many years of new product development, I’m very happy to announce that we’ve launched the new features & product on Levolor.com. Here are a few screen shots:

The updated homepage featuring new custom draperies and all of our product lines:

Preview of the inspirational pages:

Virtual Decoration: choose wall colors, trim colors, and drapery fabrics

Full product configurator: custom draperies at the convenience of your computer screen

Free samples. It doesn’t get any easier than this page.

And of course, drop-down menus for easier/quicker site navigation. What a concept!

And as with any major product or site re-launch, these few screen shots don’t come close to capturing the amount of “behind the scenes” work that went into the site — you know, the stuff that only the development team truly appreciates!

Now it’s time to start digging into the analytics to see how online visitors navigate this product category. It’s a much different process than custom blinds & shades, so the online insights will be interesting to learn from.

This blog has a new URL as of 5/15/08. In an effort to have a web address that better aligns with the content of this blog, the new URL is: www.ebusinessblog.org

All old posts and links will automatically forward to the new blog URL. The RSS feed remains unchanged!

-Eric

Just used RedBox DVD Rentals for the first time this evening and what an impressive service:

• DVD rentals for $1.00/day
• Easy-to-use interface
• Online integration (rent online, pick up at your local RedBox location)
• Return the DVD to any RedBox kiosk (not just the one you rented from)
• Slick little DVD dispenser that casually spits out the DVDs in their hard-plastic cases

These are new to our area in Greensboro, NC but I know are popular in the Atlanta area (based on feedback from a few friends who pick up DVDs from the RedBox at their local McDonald’s). And what a business model this must be: Drop a kiosk in the store, feed it new DVDs each week for new releases, and watch the money roll in. I’d love to learn more about their infrastructure and how they keep tabs on the health of the machines.

The user experience on the computer kiosk is well-done, although I wish the system was a little more responsive (i.e. faster). It could use a slightly larger screen to view the DVD titles. These are very minor complaints considering how easy it was to walk up and rent a DVD for the first time. Our main problem the whole time was feeling “rushed” by the other people waiting in line to rent and return their movies!

The kid in me still loves chocolate milk. However, chocolate syrup has been missing from our fridge for a while now so I picked up a new container of Hershey’s chocolate syrup today while running a few errands. I was pleasantly surprised to see they had redesigned the cap on the bottle. Here’s a picture of the old style (remember how it would always not get fully closed and would get all crusty?):

Here’s the new and improved design which, so far, stays much cleaner, easier to open, and easier to use:

Sometimes it’s the little things in life that make me happy. Oh, and by the way, Chip’s Ahoy has improved the labeling on their product so you don’t accidentally open it on the sides of the packaging (see my original post where I accidentally mauled the package):

In light of Levolor.com exiting the beta stage, we’ve distributed a press release with high-level details of the “new” online store available on the site.

This release made the rounds beginning on 2/18/08. While I didn’t personally anticipate much coverage from the release (outside of the blinds & shades industry, releases like this get a “So, what?” reaction), it’s interesting to see the increased traffic from visitors from North Carolina. Presumably, because we’re based in North Carolina, the local publications picked up the press release and the information resonated more with consumers who happened to come across the release in their home state.

One thing which I still don’t understand is why press releases on most sites (like our release at Internet Retailer), don’t hyperlink our website address, or better yet, even provide our web address. It’s funny to see an industry publication not only whiddle down a press release, but also ignore the very features and functionality that make the Internet what it is.

I’m happy to announce that Levolor.com has finally left the realm of being in “beta.” We ran the site in its beta form for a little over 6 months and just rolled the first round of updates and fixes (since leaving beta) to the site last week. Here’s an overview of what’s new:

New Products Added:

As we begin to expand our web presence, we are also beginning to add our full line of products to the website (though only custom blinds & shades may be purchased online). “Blinds, Shades, & Drapery Hardware” is the tagline under the logo on the website and you can now find all of this product information under the “products” tab on the website.

New Product Page Layouts:

We’ve also updated our product pages to reflect the content and end-user experience found in our in-store sample books. This combines beautiful room scene photography with nice, large pictures of product options, and best of all, videos to help describe product options.

Online Store

Our online store now features all of our custom blinds and shades. During our beta period, we only offered a limited selection of products.

What was learned during the beta period
I’m normally opposed to plastering “BETA” across the heading of a website because it’s become more a buzz word than anything in the online industry. Everything seems to be launched in Beta and because it’s in Beta, it gets more hype from online bugs for one reason or another. That being said, I’m glad we did it because end-users were more understanding if something went wrong on the website during the beta period. I was actually surprised to see how many consumers shopping for our products mention the “Beta” moniker in their comments.

Consumers are browsing online first
What we didn’t expect was a backlash from consumers who couldn’t find all of our product information online. Even though we don’t sell a large portion of our products on our website, it didn’t seem to matter — consumers wanted the information on the site. This is not necessarily specific to us but is really a trend in consumer shopping habits across the board. Not everyone goes online to purchase, they are going online to research so they can be educated before they purchase.

Consumers are arming themselves with information (because the store associate doesn’t have the knowledge)
In our retail channels (big box stores), store associates are hard to come by and they are not always experts in the area of the store you happen to flag them down in (ever grabbed the “electrical guy” at Home Depot who happened to be passing through the patio furniture display?). Being armed with full product information and narrowing down your options between one or two final products that you’d like to take a look at in store before purchasing seems to be the trend these days.

This really comes as no surprise as my wife and I do the same thing. Recently we purchased a Dyson vacuum, researched it on the Dyson website, and went to Best Buy (retail store) to close the purchase after we compared two models in the store. Naturally, the “car audio manager” helped us and did nothing more than read the description of the product off of the box as we asked questions about the two models we were interested in. About all he was good for was helping with the honoring of the online price from bestbuy.com (which was cheaper than the in-store price).

Beta launches are a Good Thing
Despite my reservations about jumping on the Beta bandwagon, the Beta period helped us understand more of what consumers were looking for on our website and this has fueled the online effort. I would recommend releasing a site in “Beta” if it encompasses major changes for consumers — they’ll be understanding and will be a bit more candid if they run across a problem or frustration. The general public is becoming more familiar with what “Beta” means.

Next steps for Levolor.com
While I won’t outline the roadmap for Levolor.com, I’ll continue to post updates as we make major updates to the site. For now, we’ll just focus on incremental improvements now that all of our custom blinds and shades are available online for sale.

In this era of Google-dominated web applications, it’s a rare find when another competitive service by a much more established company is actually better than Google’s. My wife and I are AAA members. AAA provides a service in which they will map out a road trip for your travel needs. This service is called a “TripTik.” Historically, this has been a service that you call AAA for and they send you a bound, printed copy of your driving plan, like this:

Like any company adjusting to modern times, AAA is moving many of their services to their website at AAA.com. This includes the TripTik service (you can still order a printed copy!).

AAA TripTik vs. Google Maps
One thing I do give Google Maps is the fast, convenient nature of their mapping tool — which is great for short trips and quick directions to that new restaurant or store in your area that you want to check out. For road trips, however, it falls short of the robustness of AAA’s TripTik service.

Google’s UI Advantage:
This post wouldn’t be complete without some discussion on usability and user interface. Google makes it extremely easy to quickly type in your start and end destination. Simply enter in the following:

minneapolis, mn to chicago, il

And voila! Your map is created.

AAA’s UI Disadvantages
On AAA.com’s TripTik, you have to first find the “Internet TripTik” link (small, fairly unnoticeable button…see it? It’s under the “Gas prices near you” tool on the bottom right-hand side of their homepage.):

There is no easy URL to remember like there is for Google Maps (maps.google.com). If there is one, they don’t advertise it, which is a bummer. A simple http://triptik.aaa.com that redirected to the full URL would work wonders! Here’s their full URL:

http://ww1.aaa.com/scripts/WebObjects.dll/AAAOnline.woa/2004?

association=aaa&poiKey=259&club=111&page=ITTServices&

sessionRedirect=1198155291293

Next, there’s the interface for entering your “start” and “end” destinations. This is also another usability issue compared to Google Maps in that you are required to type in your city separately from the state (you have to choose the state from a drop-down menu). This is another reason why Google Maps is better than AAA for “quick” directions & maps. It’s much easier to quickly enter a “start” and “end” destination within Google Maps: Type in maps.google.com, page loads instantly, type in “from city, state to city, state” and you’re done. The extra clicks and effort to fill in the AAA TripTik do not make it a viable tool for extremely easy and quick data entry.

AAA’s advantage over Google
The meat of the TripTik service is its ability to map out detailed driving directions, including lodging information, notices on when to expect heavy traffic (when traveling during rush hour through various cities), and road construction details. These are all areas where Google Maps does not provide any guidance.

Additionally, the “printable” version of AAA’s TripTik provides a nicely-formatted PDF specifically designed to be printed on your home computer. Google Maps on the other hand will print like any normal web page would — adding page breaks where it’s most inconvenient. AAA’s TripTik PDF’s have directions in logical chunks so that it’s easy to follow on your road trip. Take a look at the screen shots:

(The yellow boxes indicate road contruction. Also notice the rush hour notification at the bottom of map #2)

AAA Internet TripTik trumps Google Maps for road trips…but not for quick, local trips
With a few minor changes, AAA could actually be a contender with Google Maps for quick, local directions and trips. Longer distances, where it’s important to know where lodging is available, where road construction is, etc. and it’s an excellent tool. I’m willing to look past the usability nuances for the much more detailed information for extended road trips.

Evaluate the usability on your website
Are there any areas like this on your website? Would a simple, easy-to-remember URL benefit your consumers or customers so they can quickly arrive at a tool they use most often (i.e. maps.google.com)? Or do you force them to navigate through your site to find the tools they need?

Subtle changes can go a long way in improving your site’s usability and customer satisfaction. It’s always good to solicit feedback from your web users and do frequent competitive analysis of “the other guys’” sites.

As the blogosphere ogles at the “success” of the “Elf Yourself” campaign, I find myself wondering if the old cliché “there’s no such thing as bad press” is true. While this particular campaign has been positive for Office Max, will it (ever) contribute to the bottom line? Or does this campaign simply go down in the books as “fun” and win an award?

The “Elf Yourself Campaign
Put together by Officemax, here’s the comparison of the ElfYourself.com demographics and Officemax.com demographics:

The above graph is for ElfYourself.com

The below graph is for Officemax.com:

Demographic & site analysis
Officemax.com hits the internet average for female and male visitors skewing slightly higher in the 55-64 and 65+ demographics. The ElfYourself.com campaign however is highly skewed towards 65+ females. We do see an obvious jump in traffic to OfficeMax.com during the same timeframe that the ElfYourself.com site has been running (presumably due to the coupons offered on ElfYourself.com when you click on the OfficeMax logo).

Will it translate to revenue? Time will tell.

PR firms focusing on “viral” vs. product
Switching gears from OfficeMax to my day job…it’s interesting seeing the campaign ideas we are pitched from marketing firms who aspire to earn our business. There’s an overwhelming amount of focus with online marketing, but in our industry (blinds & shades), is making it up the ranks of digg.com really going to translate to revenue? Many marketers think so and go out of their way to focus on links we receive due to PR, blog mentions, and diggs. Let’s step back for a moment and focus on digg.com’s demographics (courtesy of Quantcast):

Skewing higher than the internet average on the 25-34 Male demographic is not exactly the sweet spot for us when it comes to spending money on press that end up on digg.com.

Common sense in online marketing
Viral campaigns are fine — if they are targeted towards the demographic you are seeking as customers. digg.com is not a “mass consumer” demographic and should not be treated as one by marketers, but for some reason it is. This is nothing against digg. There comes a time when you have to ask yourself the “So, what?” question when a marketing pitches you a concept. With the viral success of the Elf Yourself campaign, be sure to ask yourself the “So, what?” question if a marketer comes to you with a great viral idea that does not pave a clear path to sales revenue.

Marketing campaigns can and should be measured in sales
Some marketing agencies are not held accountable to revenues generated from campaigns. Generating impressions is great, but if the campiagn cannot be tied directly to sales, then you should find a way to measure it. Every campaign we run is measured — sometimes we may not know the potential return (which is often the case testing new ideas/technologies surrounding promotions and marketing), so we measure it to see what the return is after the campaign is over with.

Your sales cycle may be a long sales cycle, so campaign “success” may not be measurable immediately — it could take weeks, months, or even years. If this is the case, plan your campaigns accordingly because the sales cycle should help drive the types of promotions that work for your business. OfficeMax seems to have played their cards right with the coupons/discounts on ElfYourself.com and the traffic spike to Officemax.com.

However, traffic spikes do not always equate to revenue — especially if the campaign is driving unqualified customers to your site. This is the one thing that many agencies fail to grasp in this new age of viral campaigns and del.icio.us, YouTube, and digg.com’s of the world.