In light of the recent iPhone 3GS announcement this week at Apple’s WWDC conference, I investigated pricing and navigated through the “upgrade” steps made available on Apple’s site. My wife currently has an aging Nokia phone that is eligible for an upgrade and the 8GB iPhone fits the bill for her needs.

Abandoning the purchase funnel

Having said that, I went through the multi-step validation process on Apple’s site, but it was unable to retrieve our account information from AT&T, to which I was prompted to search for a local Apple Store. Not needing to do this, I simply abandoned the purchase funnel with a mental note to “visit the store this weekend” since I hit a dead end on the site and wasn’t going to be able to complete the upgrade online.

Automated follow-up to purchase abandonments

About 15 minutes later, I received the following, automated email:

Very impressive — an automated follow-up recognizing that I abandoned the purchase funnel for the iPhone upgrade. I must say that I am not used to this type of marketing where the website acts like a true salesperson.

Technically speaking, it’s not difficult to implement this. It’s a perfect blend of leveraging technology to solve a business problem: how do you capture the consumer’s attention after they’ve left your site without making a purchase?

Earlier this year the Amerock.com website become another branded site that our E-Business team was to manage. The challenge that came with this responsibility was migrating the “look and feel” of the existing site to a different platform. What entailed was about a week of work to craft a new set of stylesheets that essentially made the “new” site look nearly identical to the old site.

We did however take liberties in updating products based on new product rollouts and added functionality that didn’t previous exist. Here are some before and after screen shots:

Product Navigation (Old)

Old site consisted of a 4-layer navigation schema:

1. Choose Product Category
2. Choose Product Type
3. Filter Product List (Choose 1 Finish, Style, and/or Collection)
4. View Product (See details, finishes, etc.)

The problem with this style of navigation is it forced the end-user to make too narrow their product selection too soon in the process just to see a product list. Finish coordination across product types is important in cabinet hardware, so the desire to see “all products with a satin nickel finish” needed to be possible. With the old site, this could not be done.

Above we see Decorative Hardware product types.

Here we see a product listing, but we can only choose from thedrop-down menus for further filtering options.

And here we see product details with finishes. Lots of unused real estate.

Product Navigation (new)

A simple 2-step process exists:

1. Choose Product Category (from the main navigation of the site)
2. Select multiple filters and see your product results

Select multiple filters across multiple filter types. An additional bonus is seeing the filter “counts” so there’s no guesswork when you’re clicking on options wondering if you will see any additional product results or not.

Clear visibility in the left-hand navigation of what filters are selected and which product results you’re viewing. Additionally, there are “results per page” options as well.

Product comparison also didn’t exist on the old site. It is now available on the new site.

Image zooming was also unavailable on the old site. Thanks to Adobe Scene7′s dynamic image zooming technology, we use it on all product pages to enable the end-user to zoom in on-the-fly on the product image.

Table Stakes

It seems odd to be showing some of the above features as they are mostly “table stakes” features these days. However, there are many large e-commerce sites that still do not offer simple things like product image zooming, unlimited product comparison functionality (do I really need to be limited to comparing 3 products at a time so the site design stays scaled proportionately?), and “results per page” customizations. Amerock.com is now fairly level-set with these “table stakes” features an we begin the continuous improvement with repeatable processes.

Earlier this year, the Amerock Cabinet Hardware brand within our corporation was merged into our business unit already consisting of Levolor and Kirsch to create a combined Global Business Unit called “Decor”. The Decor Business Unit rolls up under the Home and Family Group of Newell Rubbermaid as outlined here.

What’s exposed when businesses merge

Previously, Amerock was grouped under a different Global Business Unit and run independently of operations at Levolor and Kirsch. The merging of these business units has presented an interesting challenge from a website strategy perspective. The challenges are not unique to us and the purpose of this post is to not outline the specific challenges we faced but rather to focus on the high-level areas that mergers and acquisitions will eventually uncover:

Business processes, software platforms, job responsibilities, and online strategy must adapt to the new environment.

Enterprise E-Business must be scalable

I am fortunate to manage a team of people who are eager to take on new challenges and responsibilities. What we quickly discovered as it related to our Online Platform was that it had all been built around a single business (blinds & shades). This meant some of the software was specific to business processes unique to Levolor and Kirsch but more specifically, our business processes were very tied to Levolor and Kirsch.

When Amerock was infused into the mix, we had to re-engineer several areas (listed below). I won’t go into how we modified these processes but at a high level, these were the core areas impacted:

Enterprise E-Business must function on repeatable processes

I cannot stress this enough particularly in the past few years in working in a Fortune 500 environment after coming from a small business of 20-25 employees. The enterprise is too massive for any one person to “know it all” so processes must be rigid, repeatable, with good people employed to manage through the processes and modify the processes when they identify deficiencies.

Tribal knowledge is acceptable in small business and is what enables small business to be agile. Tribal knowledge contaminates the enterprise, especially in the E-business arena. If an enterprise process cannot be repeated by more than one person without significant “hand holding,” then it is not a repeatable process. A merger or acquisition will quickly expose deficiencies in processes.

Scalable, repeatable processes does NOT equal inflexible online experience

Perhaps one area where IT folks get it wrong most often is deploying a scalable, repeatable process that limits creativity (particularly as it relates to an online experience). Scalable and repeatable processes must inherently have a mechanism for dealing with unique business requirements and the ongoing management of these “exceptions.” This is all the more reason why the E-Business/IT group needs a seat at the (business strategy) table. Without knowing the direction of the business, it is impossible to anticipate every possible scenario and build scalable, repeatable processes that will last.