The post Merchant newsletter — May 2013 appeared first on Wize Commerce.

Our examination suggests that the science of dynamic pricing—dynamically changing prices to optimize revenue—is a new practice at most retailers and at many it’s not yet in practice at all.

Price competition in retail has always been intense, but it used to take weeks or months to play out. Now changes can happen by the minute. With the growth of online and mobile phone-based shopping, fast-changing prices create real-time sales implications that many retailers aren’t equipped to manage.

In the wild world of travel, millions of prices are in flux each minute and technologies have long been established to extract every marginal revenue dollar from the system. But in the retail world, we still live in an environment where prices are often set for a season, and coupons or some similar sales-period-based merchandising program are how price stimulation or competition is managed. Even the stalwart price sticker represents a limitation to effective management today.

Where do we go from here?

I think it’s clear we’re witnessing the rise of the always-connected, price-conscious consumer as a permanent and growing segment. But the mobile devices and back-end technologies that allow these consumers to search for the best deals anytime and anywhere also make it easier than ever for merchants to target them, match prices if necessary… and importantly, monetize.

Here are 5 ways merchants can maintain profitable relationships with price-conscious shoppers:

1. Implement a smart approach to dynamic pricing: A smart approach to dynamic pricing is one that’s driven by strategy, governed by algorithms, and as close to real-time as you can get. The Wize Commerce price and search APIs that support our Shopping Network and Silhouettes allow merchants to do just that, by aligning specific search terms to specific products and current prices across a wide variety of competitors.
   
   
2. Make comparison shopping work for you in-store: Our in-store optimization service, now in prototype, allows merchants to offer real-time mobile price matching guarantees and upsells to targeted shoppers currently in your store. By integrating POS, Web, and existing loyalty programs, merchants can create more personalized relationships and increase shopping cart size, while ensuring that the right percentage of sales and customers stay margin-positive.
   
   
3. Optimize your online channels: Make sure your online presences offers broad product assortment, easy and clear access to product information, expansive marketing customization, and expedited delivery. Optimize (in other words: redesign) your online experience for mobile and tablet.
   
   
4. Provide unique value in-store: Head towards unbundling the services in your store so that your in-store and online experiences fully complement each other. Innovate with new touch points to create new customer benefits. Empower your associates with information and the best mobile devices. At every touch point, acknowledge the online shopper in your store. If an in-store function isn’t equal to or better than its online equivalent, change or get rid of it.
   
   
5. Create new channels specifically targeted at price-sensitive shoppers: Our new site Price Machine is an example of this strategy—giving merchant customers already using our Shopping Network the ability to add an online channel for price-conscious shoppers without undercutting their current channel strategies or performance.

Contact us to learn more about how our price optimization services can help your business thrive.

The post Getting smart about dynamic retail pricing appeared first on Wize Commerce.

The Wize Commerce platform uses big data and statistical methods to drive optimal monetization and ROI for our customers.

It all starts with predictive modeling.

To succeed in a simple system, you gotta have a gimmick (or so they say). But when you’re dealing with complex digital systems—with massive streams of real-time and offline data at every step of the way—you need powerful algorithms to beat the competition.

Like our merchant customers, we use algorithms every day to solve a myriad of challenges, including social interest identification, mobile conversion improvement techniques, SEM keyword selection and bidding, page optimization, product recommendations and ROI projections to optimize cross-channel marketing spend.

But for us, two things are different.

The first is our scale. We create over $1B worth of transactions per year, and have been delivering competitively unbeatable results for over a decade, working with many of the world’s biggest sellers across a huge range of categories.

The second is how much skin we have in the game. The nature of our business is that we have millions of dollars invested in keyword bids and other traffic and revenue optimization techniques at any one time. Essentially, we’ve “bet” the money before we‘ve even begun. So our forecasts better be accurate.

Predictive modeling is at the core of what we do and how we think. Statistical methods drive our technology, which in turn drives our statistical methods… and this virtuous cycle is what drives our business. Over ten years, millions of scenarios, and hundreds of product categories, we’ve developed our algorithms to predict:

• Quantitative ad value for different sites and publishers
• Optimal search rankings and recommendations
• Optimal weightings of social signals at each step of the purchase process
• Etc.

Behind the scenes, we use Hadoop for data aggregation, and Hive and Cassandra to store and access data across millions of products and user profiles. And we’re always refining. Search algorithm changes last year delivered significant revenue lift on Nextag.com and these algorithms are now used across many of our Shopping Network sites to optimize different objective functions.

Because we’re an independent service provider, when we win, our merchant customers win as well. Here are two common traps we help with:

• The big search, social, and content ecosystems have created enormous value, but their business models are essentially extractive: merchants who work directly with or optimize only for only one ecosystem are essentially playing blackjack against the house—and the house always wins. The Wize Commerce platform uses predictive modeling to optimize traffic and monetization across all channels, not just one.

• Over time, individual merchants tend to develop deep expertise in their own data and catalog and the unique quirks of their business. But the danger of narrow specialization is that you optimize the wrong thing, and ignore a trend, signal, or important technique that could help you. We’re expert at such techniques, as our Silhouette, our in-store optimization service, and others demonstrate with real results.

Contact us to learn more about how Wize Commerce predictive modeling expertise can boost your traffic and revenue performance.

The post A Wize approach to predictive modeling appeared first on Wize Commerce.

Here’s an interesting look at Wize Commerce by Hendrik Laubscher, an e-commerce blogger based in South Africa. In his post, Laubscher notes how Wize Commerce is more than just the company that operates Nextag, and he’s right. We’re increasingly recognized for the broad and powerful set of monetization and traffic optimization technologies that we provide to some of the world’s top merchants.

As our own EVP of Sales, Mike Fury, said in response to the post: “Wize Commerce is about the platform. Our Shopping Network and Silhouette service allow us to meet diverse merchant needs through that platform.”

If you’d like more information about our suite of services, or if you want to learn about how Wize Commerce can help your company grow its online business, contact us.

The post “Electric Thoughts” on Wize Commerce appeared first on Wize Commerce.

One of our recent talks features experts Jijoe Vurghese, Platform & Infrastructure Manager, and Julian Ong, Principle Engineer UI Platform, talking about the Wize Commerce technology platform.

The edited notes and video for this talk are below.

How we’ve built our Services Platform

Wize Commerce is a platform for acquisition and revenue optimization of e-commerce traffic. We have been profitable for the past 10 years and Nextag is now the #2 paid comparison-shopping site on the Internet.

We’re evolving from a shopping-comparison engine, to offering our Wize Commerce platform to businesses outside of our company. To accomplish this, we have to make it easy for customers to leverage our platform. We think the best way to do this is to make this platform a set of services.

The work at Wize Commerce is progressing along two tracks. First, we are building a framework to support services with features like request prioritization, controlled rate of service requests, and automated generation of documentation to make it easier for people to consume these services. The second track requires developing and deploying the actual services themselves.

Having an SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) helps our partners achieve their goals by having all the heavyweight business logic, such as billing calculation, user personalization, search results customization , etc., go to the back-end of the website. So the front end of the website just has to worry about presentation. 

Some of the services we’ve developed for our shopping comparison sites:

• Product search service, which allows us to access our vast catalog of millions of products.
• Our visit and click service, which allows us to track users across our site and allows us to bill merchants based on what features the user is seeing.
• Our Buzz Score service (a Buzz Score is basically a measure of the social buzz around a product), which will help a site create much more compelling social features.

Next on our roadmap is A/B testing services. Over the years, we’ve developed a very robust and highly optimized A/B testing framework in Java.  We’re exposing this experimental framework as a service and creating a Ruby client for it.

How our clients use our Services Platform

When a client wants to sign up for services provided by Wize Commerce, the first thing they do is set up and provision their account. Secondly, they provide their catalog. We support several different formats for the catalog to make it easier for our customers. We call this our import service, which ingests a customer’s catalog and makes it available for search. Then, we agree on the specific products and categories we want to bid on. 

When a user comes to one of our client sites, the first thing that will happen is our visit service will be called. This will create a visit, which will begin the process of tracking the user throughout the site. Next, the client site will call our experimentation service, which will determine which side of the A/B tests the user will be on – for the hundreds of tests we have going on at any given time. The user will then browse around the site for a bit, and when the user makes a significant click, they’ll call out to our click service which will record the click information into our data store.

In front of these three services, we have a shared externalization layer, which handles authentication, throttling, and json translation. What this allows us to do is control access to our services, as well as translate our thrift responses (Apache Thrift is the language in which our services speak) into whatever format the client wants.

Final thoughts

In its end state, the Wize Commerce platform exposes millions of events that occur inside the platform in near real time to our clients, calling our traffic acquisition and revenue optimization services.

Subscribe to the Wize Commerce blog to get news on Wize Commerce expert talks and other events, as we launch them.

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The results were surprising. Here’s what we found:

• Two-thirds (65%) of mobile Nextag users who are linked to a seller’s web site eventually purchase the exact or similar product they were shopping for
• Almost one-quarter (22%) of these purchases are made from the linked merchant:
  
  • One-quarter purchased immediately via their mobile device
  • Over one-third purchased from the merchant’s retail store
  • The remaining purchases were made later via computer or mobile device
• Customers purchase, but they often delay
  • Of the customers who buy the exact product, half purchase within 48 hours and half take longer than 48 hours to buy
  • More expensive products take longer to buy
• Mobile Nextag customers are typically at home when they are linked to the merchant, reflecting a shift from computer to mobile usage, even at home
• Mobile Nextag customers who do not purchase immediately are serious shoppers who intend to buy
  • More than half are checking prices
  • Half say they are seriously considering buying the product

(A “Linked merchant” is a merchant link on Nextag.com. “Another online merchant” means they purchased the product online from a different online e-commerce website.)

Implications

When measured by clicks alone, mobile may not appear to be that important. But looking at the way people actually use their devices to search and make purchases makes it clear that mobile is more important than meets the eye.

Recommendations for retailers:

• Develop your mobile website. If you don’t already have one, you’re missing out on significant revenue.
• Track your mobile conversion rates, as well as your mobile-to-retail conversion rates – and spend compensatory dollars driving mobile traffic.
• Develop your website using responsive design so you can easily communicate your product and your catalog on a mobile device. Spend money on improved mobile interfaces and mobile checkouts, allowing for a simplified checkout process as much as possible.
• Get to know your mobile customers without asking any personal information. Capture user history and actions based on the device id without requiring consumers to enter any personal information.
• Make it easy for your customers to sign up for your loyalty program and employ techniques for strong customer engagement on your mobile website or mobile app.
• If you have physical stores, make use of your customer’s existing location to target specific products.
• Capture the mobile shopper within the first 48 hours to close the sale. Continued contact after their first visit is vital to closing the sale. Experiment with:
  • Personal emails
  • Retargeting ads
  • Live chat/calls to answer shopping questions
  • Displaying countdown clocks to push conversion
  • Communicating the benefits of online shopping with free shipping and free returns
  • Offering price matching guarantees

Wize Commerce is in the process of integrating mobile into our Silhouette revenue optimization services. If you want to be one of the first to implement and test a mobile Silhouette, please contact us.

The post Wize Commerce report: Mobile shopping, purchasing behavior, and what it means for retailers appeared first on Wize Commerce.

Real-time Social Data Ads are made possible by our proprietary Wize Commerce Social Analytics System which we wrote about recently on our blog.

These new online ads are the next step in our ongoing efforts to show how the smart use of social data can lead to better, more effective digital marketing strategies, and to provide merchants with better results for the same marketing spend.

Contact us and let us know you’re interested in hearing more about how we can help you improve your retargeting banner program.

The post New Real-time Social Data Ads boost click-through rates by 10% appeared first on Wize Commerce.

Wize Commerce CEO, Jeff Katz, shared his thoughts today in Fast Company online.

You can read about it here. Let us know what you think.

The post The future of shopping appeared first on Wize Commerce.

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We recently wrote about how smart e-commerce operators can optimize performance, improve their interface – and ultimately increase their bottom line – by making the most of visitor data. But visitor data is far from the only option.

In this post, we will highlight four ways e-commerce companies can also better leverage third-party data to enhance customer satisfaction and marketing effectiveness and grow their business.

Data Management Platforms

Looking to reach more of the people most likely to become your customers? Data management platforms (DMPs) can help.

Over the last few years, DMPs have become popular with marketers as a way to understand their audience and extend the reach of their campaigns. At their simplest, DMPs aggregate data on the interests, behavior and demographics of users across a network of publishers. They then integrate that information with your company’s own user data to identify the type of users who will convert best on your site – which allows you to then target more similar users across affiliated ad networks.

Demand Forecasting and Dynamic Pricing

Continuous, real-time price updates have become the new competitive reality in the world of e-commerce. And while this move has been embraced by many top online retailers, smaller online merchants are struggling to keep up.

A system that analyzes how price – along with many other factors – affects click-through rates for different merchants selling the same product can effectively forecast demand at different price points. Such a model can, for example, enable merchants to dynamically offer a coupon based on current market conditions that will maximize their total margin for a given product or move a certain number of units over a given period of time.

Wize Commerce also helps retailer’s leverage external pricing and demand data through our Radar price alert platform. Whether through the use of Sillhouette, a widget on your site, or as part of our standard Radar email marketing campaigns, we can help you reach highly-qualified customers who have already expressed interest in buying your products but are waiting for the right price.

High-Quality Content

As a marketer or e-commerce site operator, you know that good content helps attract and convert users. For a retailer, content can be anything above and beyond basic product and price info, such as quality names and descriptions, product reviews, videos, or recommendations – and there are a number of third-party data providers looking to sell this type of content to enrich your commerce site.

At Wize Commerce, not only do we integrate data from third party providers, we have developed our own proprietary content platform, which includes content like:

• High quality product names and attributes optimized based on consumer shopping behavior
• Structured product relationships, such as related product models, product lines, etc.
• Proprietary product ratings and review extracts based on aggregating and analyzing millions of product reviews across the web
• Personalized product recommendations based on analyzing consumer behavior on our network of shopping sites

Social Data

Nearly every commerce site now has some form of integration with at least one social network like Facebook, Pinterest or Twitter. But many sites simply create buttons to make it easy for users to share their favorite products with friends, and leave it at that.

While this simple level of social integration is often helpful in building awareness and driving traffic, few retailers are taking the next step and leveraging this wealth of social data about their products to improve the shopping experience on their own sites.

At Wize Commerce, we analyze consumer behavior on our global network of high-volume shopping sites to create dynamic, personalized product recommendations. With the right tools, merchants, too, can harness product-level social data from Facebook, Twitter and other sources to enhance the shopping experience for their customers.

Our Radar price alert platform helps our merchant customers use email and onsite notifications to reach highly-qualified customers who have expressed interest in buying your products but are waiting for a lower price

We also help retailers display social context and trends in their product listings (e.g. “#3 most tweeted Television”), incorporate social signals (e.g. number of recent likes and tweets) into search ranking algorithms, and develop onsite and email content pushes of the hottest trending products.

The bottom line is that all e-commerce companies will need to learn how to better utilize and manage third-party audience data if they hope to keep up and stay relevant.

Wize Commerce has extensive experience doing precisely that, and we are continually experimenting with how best to leverage such data to help our merchant partners reach more qualified customers.

So, as you consider how to better leverage this data to grow your business, we encourage you to contact us to start a conversation about how we can help.

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