A Passion for Customer Satisfaction

Smart Merchandiser Powers Back–Office Analytics for the Online Store

“Smart Merchandiser represents everything we’ve been looking for in a tool that will help streamline workflow for our merchants” 

 

-- Greg Pulsifier, General Manager for E-Commerce at The North Face

 

E-Commerce is growing exponentially, both in popularity and in the sophistication of the shopping experience. And even the savviest of merchandisers trying to compete in this continually growing industry can often find themselves stymied by the complex challenges in designing a successful physical layout for their web store, overcome by the need to juggle multiple programs to gather and analyze data on what their customers like and want. 

 

Zobrist, a California consulting firm specializing in e-commerce, offers a solution to this two-fold problem with the introduction of Smart Merchandiser for the WebSphere Commerce Platform. Smart Merchandiser is a web application designed to help manage the online store and provide a merchandiser with powerful analytics, an intuitive inventory management system and other tools to optimize their selling potential.

 

Zobrist’s Smart Merchandiser streamlines workflow while providing critical business intelligence to assist in merchandising decisions for online stores. “This product is designed to help retailers really listen to their customers,” says Zobrist Solution Architect, AlanTsang. “They can react to trends more quickly. “If, for example, a popular actress starts carrying one of their handbags, Smart Merchandiser can alert the retailer that there is a buzz about that product, and they can highlight it physically on their site. 

 

If they are low on inventory for a certain product, they can minimize or even temporarily remove it from the site. They can immediately see what products are hot sellers. There’s so much data out there. This gives retailers a tool to listen better and not just speculate on what people are thinking.”

 

Merchandisers can see who’s visiting their site, which products they’re searching, and most importantly, which ones they’re buying. This allows them to plan more effective campaigns and better target their customers, putting the products they want right up front, to optimize the shopper’s experience and facilitate the highest possible conversion rate. 

 

“Things that used to take a couple days to accomplish are now taking a couple hours”
AlanTsang Zobrist Solution Architect

 

The North Face® is the premier supplier of authentic and technically innovative sporting and expedition gear be it technical outerwear to survive Arctic cold, premier tents to withstand jet stream winds, or efficient footwear to sprint across the country. Greg Pulsifier, General Manager for E-Commerce at The North Face stated, “Smart Merchandiser represents everything we’ve been looking for in a tool that will help streamline workflow for our merchants, as well as provides additional business intelligence to assist in merchandising decisions.” 

 

“We’ve seen so much growth on the web,” says Tsang. “People have been really putting a lot of effort into the front end. This is the first product that brings the back office functions up to par.”

 

One big challenge every merchandiser faces is the physical display of merchandise on a web page, kiosk or mobile device. Too often product data is pulled from the database by category and displayed arbitrarily on the screen without any control. If the merchandiser attempts to influence the ordering of products, to highlight a popular product for example, he/she has to add a sequence number to these products. When the number of products reaches a hundred or more, keeping track of the order becomes a necessary yet burdensome and time-consuming task. 

 

Merchandisers have many reasons to want to control how the products are displayed on a web page: 

• Popularity – How well is the product selling online? The merchandiser has to pour through sales reports to see how much is sold, when and where. 

• Conversion rate – How many shoppers actually check out once they view this product? 

• Ratings and Reviews – What is the perceived quality of the product? Is it well received by shoppers? 

• Sentiments Analytics – Are people talking about this product? Is what they are saying good or bad? 

• Inventory – What quantity of product is on hand? It is important not to disappoint the shopper so when there is no inventory, many merchandisers prefer not to show products on the page.

 

Smart Merchandiser is the first single tool that allows merchandisers to control the visual display of products online and provides all the information at their fingertips to help them make intelligent decisions about how those products should be displayed. 

 

Because Smart Merchandiser presents products as thumbnail images on a screen, the merchandiser can grab and move these thumbnails around with the mouse, placing them in any desired order. Smart Merchandiser also presents color information, sales, web analytics, conversion rate, ratings and reviews, social media and inventory data as multiple layers of data on top of each thumbnail image. Now the merchandiser has the tools right at his/her fingertips to make intelligent and informed decisions on how the products should be displayed – right on the layout page. 

 

With other systems, online retailers had to juggle different programs and data sources to get a sense of how products are selling and how to position them. Managing online inventory with multiple reports and spreadsheets felt disconnected and unintuitive, not to mention time consuming. Smart Merchandiser combines several powerful tools into one graphical interface, where merchandisers can see analytics, ratings, conversion rates and in-stock numbers simply by clicking on any item in the store and make fast, informed decisions based on real-time analytics and available colors and styles.

 

Once the ordering is complete, the data is submitted to the database with the proper sequence order. The merchandiser can tag the ordering sequence and save it under a name so that it can be recalled at a later time and re-produced on the web with no additional programming needed. 

 

Analytic information is captured through multiple digital data sources such as Coremetrics web analytics on the website, Google Analytics on all the affiliate websites where products are displayed, Twitter and social network websites and ratings and reviews data feeds from Bazaar Voice, RatePoint and Power Reviews.

 

Smart Merchandiser integrates data laterally across multiple departments such as sales, marketing, merchandising and web business intelligence. The integrated data sources feed into the merchandising process so that the merchandiser can use that information to make smart decisions on how to organize and present products online. This creates a continuous, automated, streamlined and closed-loop feedback that saves merchandisers time and effort and eliminates the guess work and frustration often encountered today. Plus, the information is gathered in real time, so merchandisers can react quickly to changing markets. 

 

Tsang says that some of their customers who are using this application report that their sales are skyrocketing because they can react more quickly to customer wants and needs. 

 

Another advantage is the time savings. With the information at their fingertips, retailers can make faster decisions and then implement those decisions with a simple sweep of a mouse. “Things that used to take a couple days to accomplish are now taking a couple hours,” Tsang says.

Smart Merchandiser is built for WebSphere Commerce on WebSphere Application Server and DB2. This is the first of a series of products Zobrist hopes to introduce to the retail industry. They are currently working on expanding the tool to cover business intelligence to offer retail executives a real sense of how their products are doing across channels. Tsang would like to be able to add competitive information in a side-by-side comparison for products.

 

Tsang thinks this product has tremendous potential once customers see what it can do. “Our customers look back at the pain they had to go through before and say, why have we been doing this? This product can increase sales, productivity and employee morale. There’s just so much opportunity here.”

 

 

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