“We are not only your eCommerce vendor - we are your online partner”. Comments like this are often met with a degree of skepticism, particularly at the early stages of a client engagement.  However, it is possible for the vendors-client relationship to facilitate a truly trusted partnership that helps clients grow and expand their online business.  Since 2001, Truition has hosted and managed the NHL Auction Network (http://auctions.nhl.com), the leading source online for hockey memorabilia and collectibles. Products such as game-worn jerseys and trading cards are provided directly by the NHL, its member teams, and selected vendors. Since its inaugural season, the site has grown 10 times as a result of the hard work of the many people who have developed and marketed the site.

Parties from both the NHL and Truition collaborate to ensure that hockey fans visiting the auction site receive the best products and services in the world. What does that mean? It means ensuring teams and rare team-specific items get up on the site in a timely manner, and it also means ensuring high-quality authentic items from the best players in the game are evenly and well represented in the marketplace. It means providing a scalable, reliable platform and services for the NHL to market and advertise their auction program. It also means meeting end users and fans to make sure that all of their needs are being responded to.

Last weekend, the NHL and Truition partnered to co-sponsor an NHL Auction booth at the Sports Card and Memorabilia Expo held at the International Centre in Toronto, where they showcased the site to the thousands of hockey fans attending the show.

Truition staff familiar working on the online auction program (thanks to Carly Napier, Gary Tsaconas and Vinai Dhanrai) along with members from the NHL eCommerce Program (thanks to Joslin Warren and Jordan Morse) manned the booth all three days. Hockey fans were able to visit the booth and bid on items, giving us a chance to speak directly to the fans and receive their feedback. It was a great event with hundreds of vendors selling their memorabilia and hockey cards. Autograph sessions were taking place right near our booth with hockey stars Felix Potvin, Curtis Joseph, Johnny Bower, Claude Lemieux, and many others.

The show was very successful; so much so that we plan to run it again at the NHL Fan Fest at the 2008 NHL All Star game in Atlanta scheduled for January 26/27, 2008.

In October, “Breast Cancer Awareness Month”, the CIBC Run for the Cure took place all over Canada.  The Run is one of Canada's largest single-day, volunteer-led fundraising event dedicated to raising money and awareness for breast cancer research and education.

Each year, thousands of Canadians of all ages and from all walks of life unite to participate in the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation Run for the Cure. Individual reasons for participating in the run vary, but the goal is always the same: to create a future without breast cancer.

In light of the Run for the Cure this year, all the ladies from the Sales & Marketing, Product Development, Services and Accounting Departments at Truition decided to make their own unique contributions, and cooked up some lip-smacking lunch dishes for a company-wide Pot Luck, in an effort to raise money to support the Run for the Cure.  

Truition employees enjoyed a variety of dishes wonderfully reflecting Canadian Multiculturalism. Employees from every department at the Truition Corporate Headquarters in Toronto stepped up and gave generously towards this cause - and had fun while doing it!

Our own Michelle Elmaleh, Truition’s Marketing Communications Intern, participated in the run on September 30th.   Cheers to the Team Truition for coming together on a personal level to donate to this extremely worthy cause.

Everyone here at Truition is extremely proud of our recent win at the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Awards! The Deloitte Technology Fast 50 award program ranks the 50 fastest-growing technology companies in various countries/regions. Truition was recognized in part, for achieving an impressive 5 year revenue growth rate of 565%. Not too shabby...

Our new CFO, David Moore (that’s him in the middle), attended the swanky awards ceremony to accept the award on the company’s behalf.

As we continue to evolve as a company and grow as individuals, it is nice sometimes to stop and admire our accomplishments so far…with an eye on even bigger things to come.

I have fond memories of 1999 and 2000, between the industry parties for that latest dot com startup flush with new VC money to drink away and working late hours just trying keep my company’s platform running we were all in awe and wonderment about the future world we were working so hard to build. You couldn’t pick up a copy of the then 1" thick bi-weekly Business 2.0 publication without reading latest trends in ecommerce and many of them were mobile. There were countless predictions that we’d all be walking the sidewalks and each time we passed a Starbucks, our cell-phones would vibrate with a little SMS message offering us a $1 discount off a creamy Grande latte if we stepped inside.

Fast forward to 2007 and many of those predictions never came to fruition. We don’t bank on our cell phones, we use our home computers. We don’t pass our cell phone screen over the grocery-store bar code scanner to redeem a coupon, we still clip the old-fashioned paper variety and we certainly don’t do much ecommerce shopping on our phones. Or is that all set to change?

You can’t have picked up any newspaper across North America over the past few weeks without reading at least one story about the new Apple iPhone. It’s a little device that’s captured our imaginations and got the tech geeks salivating over un-boxing pictures on Flickr. It’s also the first mobile phone to include a fully-featured browser – Apple’s own Safari browser.

Could this be the first of a new wave of phones with fully featured browsers with (finally) fast enough connection speeds that will mean the era of mobile commerce may finally be coming? It will take the next couple of years to find out for sure, but I know if I was you, I’d be trying one of these magic little phones out for myself to see how my site looks and works on it. You never know, that next order just might come from someone sitting in a Starbucks enjoying a discounted latte while they browse for a new shirt or pair of pants in the palm of their hands.

"Hello, I'm an ecommerce site."

Loss Prevention is a topic near and dear to my heart.  It’s unclear to me if that’s because I believe in right vs. wrong or because I’m a capitalist at heart, but lets say I believe in right vs. wrong.

Knowledge really is power and when evaluating an eCommerce solution, please consider the availability of the following functionality and corresponding data.

1. User security.  Ensure your eCommerce solution supports the configuration of appropriate security for each system User and ensure there is an audit trail for all system changes that impact your bottom line (e.g. refunds, exchanges, discounts, inventory counts, price changes).

2. Refunds and exchanges.  Ensure your eCommerce solution can provide an audit trail for refunds and exchanges not only from the customer perspective, but also from the employee perspective.  Know who is processing refunds and exchanges and what is being refunded and exchanged.

3. Discounts.  Ensure your eCommerce solution can provide an audit trail of applied discounts not only from the customer perspective, but also from the employee perspective.  Know who is discounting your merchandise and what merchandise is being discounted. 

4. Inventory Counts and Pricing. Ensure your eCommerce solution can provide an accurate inventory count, the location of your inventory and an audit trail of changes to both your inventory count and your merchandise pricing not only from the customer perspective, but also from the employee perspective. 

5. Sales trends.  Ensure your eCommerce solution can provide you with sales trend data (e.g. high, low, seasonal).  Know what your sales trends are and when exceptions are occurring.

6. Payment Security.  Ensure your eCommerce solution provides payment security not only to your customers, but to your organization.  This includes credit card verification options, gift certificate verification options, etc.  Consider solution providers that are Payment Card Industry (PCI) certified.

7. Loss Prevention Tools.  Third Party Loss Prevention systems are fairly common, but can also be quite expensive and difficult to integrate.  Consider eCommerce solutions that offer Loss Prevention tools as part of their core solution.  They may not offer all of the functionality of a dedicated Loss Prevention system, but they can definitely assist in the reduction of fraud.  The ability to configure the following should be considered an asset:

·          Billing Address vs. Shipping Address validation

·          The reporting of Cancelled Order

·          The ability to assign points to certain anomalies and report Orders with points above a specific threshold

·          The reporting of Orders with specific Reason Codes attached

As a side note, recent studies have found that approximately 47% to 50% of loss are a result of employee theft.  That being said, there are reputable organizations that will perform employee background checks for a nominal fee.

Below are some recommendations from the Merchant Risk Council (MRC):

1.      Create metrics for your business and report these to management.

2.      Have a fraud rate, based on chargeback’s, of less than 0.2%

3.      Review less than 10% of your orders for fraud.

4.      Use a variety of fraud prevention tools. The top five fraud prevention tools are Address Verification Systems (used by 83% of online merchants), customer follow up (81%), the use of Card Verification Codes (75%), real time authorization on the use of credit cards (67%) and post process fraud management - following up with the consumers when the order looks suspicious - (64%).

5.      Continue to implement new technologies to combat fraud.

More and more retailers are using self-serve kiosks to provide a better, more convenient and of course more efficient purchasing experience.  It's a little impersonal, but people are becoming more comfortable with the concept.  For example, I can't remember the last time I actually spoke to someone at the bank, or was home in time to see a bank actually open.   ATMs (bank machines) are now the defacto way of withdrawing money 24/7.  In fact, while at the bank a few weeks ago, I saw people standing in line and forgot that you can actually pay bills there.

While the banking industry lead the charge out of the gates, retailers have started pulling ahead, way ahead.  Would you believe that Hero Burger has interactive kiosks for you to play with while standing in line waiting to pay?  It was pretty neat, and for the 45 seconds I was standing in line, I actually wasn't bored to tears staring off into space waiting to pay for my burger - my eyes were drawn to the kiosk that exists between the order counter, and the cash register.  It displayed movie trailers and targeted advertising - and had a captive audience!

Home Depot, Loblaws and a few other big retailers have made a leaps into the kiosk business with mixed results.  While I always see people using the self-checkout machines, people seem to prefer a real cashier.  The self-service kiosk seems to make the purchase process slightly longer, as it barks orders at me to place the purchased item in the bag (but I just DID put it in the bag!).  I also struggle to understand the advantage of a kiosk in that type of environment - each machine offsets a single employee, and 4 machines seem to require 1 employee for support.  So it saves 3 front-line employee salaries, but adds capital costs plus technical support, and doesn't really benefit the customer at all - other than a shorter line because no one wants to use them.   hmm...

I think it makes sense (right now) to utilize kiosks to facilitate purchasing when the purchase process is simple and contained.  The movies is a perfect example - high volumes of people make purchases of an essentially electronic product at infrequent times.

Some businesses go half way...  I've recently heard that Tim Hortons will be introducing pay stations at their restaurants to allow for quick Mastercard PayPass transactions.  This makes sense.  Tim Hortons business is based on $2 purchases, so they must go through customers as fast as possible to be profitable.  Introducing a contactless pay station to accept credit cards is ideal - it probably takes less time to swipe/touch a card to a reader than it does to prepare change for a $2 sale.  I am interested in how this affects their profitability.

The message I am trying to send is that an improvement should not be made for the sake of making it, rather it should solve a (fairly) well understood problem.  In Tim Hortons case - it was to accept credit cards, or improve efficiency.  In the movie business, it was to increase overall transaction capacity.

A well understood problem generally starts with the big picture, then focuses in on the bottlenecks - so your bottlenecks or problem areas have context.  Focusing on the bottlenecks alone, i.e. Home Depot or Loblaws, might result in other problems.  Given 'Depots wide range of products, maybe self-checkouts would be better served with RF product tags - so you just cruise your cart up to the self-checkout, it calculates everything magically, including the nails in your pocket, and asks for your credit card.   If it worked, that would be an improvement to both the customer AND the business.

In a previous post about Usability Lessons Through a Cup of Coffee, a small change made a big difference to a much more complicated system.  In fact, my Second Cup around the corner just made the same change and I'm loving them for it.

It’s an age old expression, but somehow it’s the last thing on most marketer’s minds when they think about their ecommerce site and consider upgrading their solution.  I’m fortunate to meet and talk to many ecommerce marketers and merchandisers at trade shows, conferences and during our own sales meetings.  I’m often struck by how many of these marketers (including those working for some of the most respected brands in their industry) forget about walking first when it comes to their own ecommerce solutions. 

There’s no doubt that advanced personalization and recommendation solutions can increase the ROI of an ecommerce site – there’s countless statistics from countless analysts and vendors to support that fact.  But at the same time, when you think about your own ecommerce solution and your plans for it, are these advanced capabilities on your mind, or do you think about the basics – do the nuts and bolts of order processing and shopping work well on your site?  Is it easy for buyers to find the products and services their looking for? 

One company I met with recently is a major world leader in wireless cellular phones and PDA’s.  They’re looking to upgrade their ecommerce site and again, personalization was top of their mind as criteria for selecting a new platform.  But when we looked at their current site, the basics were just not there.  Site layout and design was awkward, product categories were hard to navigate to from their non-commerce information pages and doing simple searches often yielded irrelevant results.  “Battery”, for example, would turn up no results at all (and that’s the most wanted accessory product they sell on their site!).

Clearly this marketer would be better served focusing on the basics and walking first. I guarantee focusing on making sure their site performs well, that the onsite search returns relevant results and that they have good SEO compatibility and have high ranking for natural search on the leading search engines first will do more to increase conversion rate and increase sales than adding a multi-variant near-neighbor recommendation engine ever will.

So the next time you think about your ecommerce site and platform, ask yourself if you’re ready to start running, or should you revisit the basics.

No there hasn’t been some strange temporal anomaly – Christmas is not happening in July this year! But it is the time when ecommerce marketers should begin thinking about Christmas.  Remember last Christmas when your staff struggled to cope with the (very welcomed) deluge of last minute holiday orders?  Remember those late nights with the IT department looking at graphs of server CPU usage? (And asking yourself, “Why am I in this meeting?”!) Well those good times are on their way again and it’s less time now to Christmas 2007 than it was since Christmas 2006.  Are you ready?

A successful online holiday shopping season begins with plenty of early planning and prep work.  Think for a moment about how many orders you processed last holiday season?  And I’m not talking about orders for the month of November and December as a whole; I mean your busiest week before the holidays – how busy was it?  Factor normal year over year growth and hopefully the added increase from your successful marketing campaigns to drive more traffic to your site and you could be looking at 10-25% more orders this year. I bet you’re remembering that CPU usage graph now!  This year, will your shoppers be greeted with a well performing site with plenty of inventory and a seamless order process, or are things a little less certain in your mind?

So what can you do to get ready?  First, plan.  Estimate your peak hourly, weekly and monthly order and site visitor numbers for the holiday season.  Talk with your IT team or ecommerce vendor now to be sure they are ready for you.  Work with your supply chain vendors or fulfillment locations to make sure they know your holiday order forecasts and can plan for the additional processing. 

Second, that new whiz-bang dynamic-personalization, recommendation engine, user generated, web 2.0 widget you’re planning on adding to your site this year better be ready well in advance of the holidays.  Most companies “black out” the holidays for major IT work – and for good reason.  The last thing you want to do two weeks before Christmas is roll out a new feature on your site that causes instability.  It’s no sense having the latest buzz word trend in ecommerce on your site if basic shopping suffers. 

And finally, think about your customers and their shopping experience in that frantic pre-Christmas rush.  Make sure you provide them with the right offers and products and gift solutions and let them know key shipping dates and order terms so that they have the right information early enough to make informed buying decisions.

Here at Truition it’s Christmas in July for us.  We’ve been busy over the last couple of weeks planning our holiday season strategies.  Surviving your own successful holiday online shopping season is incredibly difficult – doing it for more than 100 of the world’s leading ecommerce sites takes a lot of skill and planning. But thankfully, we’ve got a great team here who can’t wait for Christmas!

Happy Holidays!

On Saturday June 30th, a small group of Truites (Truition Employees) embarked on a mission that would bring any normal human to their knees.  This journey brought the team in and out of small towns, through wilderness heavily populated by wild sylvilagus floridanus, and treacherous roads.  This small, but formidable team, road 820 kilometers.

Now let me fill in the gaps...  This team, lead and organized by Bruce Waters, road a combined total of 820kms.  Bruce contributed 420kms - four hundred and twenty kilometers - HIMSELF.  While Bruce planned on sleeping early Friday night at a hotel in preparation for an early start, he forgot to consider that most people consider his 1am start time to be a part of Friday night, not Saturday morning.  Lets just say Bruce didn't get much sleep.

When Luigi arrived at 5am, Bruce had already put about 150kms on his bike.  He was making good time despite the lack of sleep.  The two of them put on a few kilometers before the rest of us were supposed to arrive at 6:45am.

Matthew arrived around 6:30am and was ready to ride.  I dragged myself in at 7:01am, to find everyone on their bikes riding around in the parking lot waiting for me.  I yelled out the window, told them that the road was for cars, unpacked my stuff and we were off about 3 minutes later.

Viliam caught up to us about 45 minutes into our ride.  He turned out to be a critical member of the team.  About 30 minutes later, while Bruce was pacing us at 27km/hr into the wind (note - 33km/hr on both Luigi and my computers), his tire burst.  While I hate to say it, I was relieved - my heart rate was out of control, my legs were burning, it was only a matter of time before I fell off my bike.  Anyways, Viliam changed the tube and assessed the tire.  It looked rough, but would get us back to the hotel were Bruce had a cache of spare parts and tools.

When we got back to the hotel and properly pumped up the tire, it was clearly not going to work - the tube was sticking out through a hole in the tire.  This is where Viliam saved the day - he taped the inside of the tire to keep the tube in.  It held for another few hundred kilometers.  Aside from being a one man support team, he personally contributed 89kms to the cause.

As noted in previous rides, this is where things get blurry. 

At the end of it all, Bruce burst one more tire about 6km from the hotel with no spare.  After unsuccessfully trying to hitch a ride, he rode on the rim back to the hotel, swapped his back wheel with Luigi's and finished the full 420kms.  Unbelievable effort Bruce.

Luigi contributed 200kms, beating his previous best by 94kms - which he clocked for the first time a few weeks earlier.  Luigi is a machine. Apparently this was all possible because of 4 bowls of pasta the night before, and pasta for breakfast.  Mental note - pasta is okay for breakfast.

Matthew contributed 63kms.  What was significant about his ride was the fact that he rode the last 3 of those kilometers with no hands while chatting with Bruce.  Or at least it seemed that way when I saw him do it.

I added a personal high of 53kms, beating my previous best by 16kms - ya, it's my second distance ride ever, and on a mountain bike no less.  Though Matthew made this feel like much less of an accomplishment when he did that 'no hands' thing on his mountain bike.  I'll be sure to blow his doors off the next time we're on the ice.

The team goal was 900kms, but we were short 2 riders, and Luigi picked up most of the slack.  So it was a complete success.  However, Tuesday morning when most of the staff wandered all bleary-eyed into the office, a few of us were limping.  Apparently my knees were meant for sitting.

We also managed to raise $705 dollars for reBOOT, a non-profit organization that refurbishes used IT equipment to charities, non-profits and local communities.  After speaking to Rich Roxborough, the Executive Director of reBOOT Canada, you realize how important it is to re-purpose or properly dispose of old hardware.  If you recently upgraded hardware, PLEASE donate your old equipment rather than storing it in the basement until it is completely useless.  :)

Congratulations on a successful event Bruce!  It was great to be a part of it.