Sleepy’s, the US based mattress professionals, is a family-owned company that has grown from a single Brooklyn location to nearly 700 stores in 50 years.
Earlier this month our sister company in the US, Salmon LLC, announced the complete development of a new transactional website using SAFE™ (Salmon’s Application Framework for eCommerce).
Their success is covered (albeit briefly) in this IBM video [head for the 3min 25sec mark]
In our statement to the press Chris Cucuzza, VP of Technology, said “Salmon LLC did an excellent job in understanding our business, delivering a solution that matched our specific requirements and delivering a sophisticated new website in a very short time. We have had a great response from customers who like the option of buying online when it suits them. We are already beating forecasted sales and doing better than projected online, taking significant sales through the website in the first 2 weeks and we have no doubt that our eCommerce initiative will contribute to a significant portion of our revenue in 2009 and future revenue growth.”
This week we announced the delivery of the first phase of an eCommerce project we have been working on with the team at Pets At Home.
K9 magazine were first to take the opportunity to review the site and their thoughts are very positive, together with a glowing video review. In it, Ryan O’Meara [K9 Media's CEO] says “other online pets retailers probably have the Pets At Home website as the benchmark by which they’ll be compared”
…..we like that a lot.
But let us know what you think of the site.
The rationale for the site is captured in Matt Stead’s [he's the Director of Multi-Channel at Pets at home] comment. He said, “It’s important we offer the convenient and enjoyable web experience that our customers demand. Combining our online and offline services is going to be a contributing factor to our success over the next few years. In the coming months we will look to trial additional functionality to meet our customers’ expectations.”
In a move that will send shudders through the established eCommerce Search providers, Google has launched Google Commerce Search.
In summary Google Commerce Search delivers the following:
Retailer access to the same, fast, Google search technology we know and love, to surface their own retail data
A scalable hosted [cloud based] solution that aims to meet seasonal volume spikes and drops, in a cost efficient way
Search grouping
Search driven promotions
Display configuration and customisation
No additional administrative cost for deployment and maintenance
Configurable reports
Integrated Google Analytics
The result?
Visitors can find the right products faster
Visitors can filter results by category, price, brand or other attributes
User-friendly spelling options and synonyms
Increased website conversions and sales
Easy deployment in days, and scale effortlessly
Yes there are many features missing when compared to the Enterprise / eCommerce search capabilities of an Endeca, Autonomy, Omniture or SLI Systems.
Yes uploading product data to the Google Merchant Center is not going to work for some.
But I wouldn’t want Google on the patch my product operates! Not when you bear in mind the impact they can have by providing information services for free – just ask Garmin or TomTom.
And yet already the blogosphere is a-wash with speculation that this is another ‘building block’ in allowing anyone (i.e. not necessarily a company) to create their own online shop. Where does that leave the SME merchant or the eCommerce Platform provider who focus on SMEs and the lower end of the midmarket?
Wow. For the 2nd year in-a-row Salmon have been named Rackspace EMEAs [Europe, Middle East and Africa] Partner of the Year.
The EMEA region sure is big, and to get the accolade for a second time is simply great news. But to be fair, we do feel we are achieving great things. Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’ for hosting solutions, combined with our insatiable desire to continue building the very best eCommerce sites in the World, combines beautifully to provide merchants of all kinds with a unique opportunity to forget about infrastructure and not have their focus or attentions diverted by eCommerce technology issues.
Instead they get to focus on what they do best: retailing & merchandising. And to use a horrendous, but appropriate, phrase – that’s a win-win-win.
Salmon’s eCommerce partner IBM has announced the release of WebSphere Commerce Version 7.0, delivering a market-leading “customer interaction platform”, which enables companies to provide a rich, customer-centric experience across multiple channels and touchpoints [more here: opens 521kb .pdf].
