Category — ecommerce

Last week I answered a call from one of my favorite retail clients. My friendly greeting was answered with “I have a vision that keeps turning into a nightmare.” No “hello, how are you?” or “Cold enough for you” chitchat in this call. She was clearly on a mission.

I suggested that we start with the vision. Her vision was an integrated organization where everything from marketing to fulfillment worked together. Customers and prospects could move easily from one channel to another finding what they need or want along the way. Their social media efforts would ease the way for their catalog and email campaigns.

She knew the benefits; we’d been discussing them for months. She knew the urgency because I’d been nagging encouraging her to get started. She knew the risks of inaction. Her competition was already gaining market share. She wanted to start the process but there was a problem. [Read more →]

Have you sat in one of those meetings where everyone is trying to claim credit for the latest bump in sales? If so, you know all of the arguments about how some channels brand while others sell. It is a circular debate without an easy answer.

This is a hot topic because most company budgets allocations are weighted by the revenue generated by the channel. More sales credited to a marketing effort equals more money for the department. This creates a departmental feeding frenzy since everyone wants their piece of the pie. [Read more →]

The question,” Is your site a library or a bookstore?” has been haunting me for weeks.

I suspect that it is one of those things that just popped into Amy Africa’s head and she tweeted it on impulse. The transfer from her thought to my mind has been keeping me awake at night.

I wondered if Amy would consider my website a library, but I wasn’t sure that I wanted it to be perceived as a bookstore. After all, I was a professional consultant, well trained in the “clients come from referrals, not advertising” mindset. To shift from “I’ll post a few links to my playbooks” to a full court press was a huge jump that I wasn’t ready to take.

Our website originally looked like this: [Read more →]