WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

WHY IT MATTERS: this short intro on selling in Amazon marketplace highlights a key concern for small retailers: customers are aggregating on marketplaces (Amazon being the largest for now) and you need to be able to dynamically decide what you sell, where, for how much and consolidate all the orders in a single. Where better than your existing ecommerce website - magento, shopify, hybris or other? Used to be this was done on your ERP (for large retailers) or POS (for single shop owners) or PIMs and OMS for those with more mature eCommerce architectures. Now it looks like you'll do everything to centralize in the Ecommerce store.

WHY IT MATTERS: an amazing account of the 3 year process to convert existing mobile apps with a new framework to improve software development productivity.

WHY IT MATTERS: a long read about tens of new developments in the works at Apple from a long time AR-VR industry watcher (he was very bullish about Google glasses back in the day). Nevertheless, the article is a good rundown of what the future of 3D in AR and VR may be. 

What I find great is that it goes beyond the classic AR-VR use cases and into a more fundamental trend of embedding digital into the real world in 3D. The examples of what is being developed in the labs is eye opening. But remember, this is R&D and will take years to become ubiquitous. 

WHY IT MATTERS: the end of 3rd party cookies will impact advertising the most. This chart highlights the 50% of revenues that go to different players (including 15% unknown!). What irritates me most is the 7% to agencies that, unfortunately, seem to do very little to earn that amount in my experience...

WHY IT MATTERS: je mets mon commentaire en français parce qu'il s'adresse spécifiquement aux amis du panier bleu. L'article de Ben Evans soulève une question importante et fait la démonstration que non, Amazon ne sait pas. Et que pour Amazon, pour l'instant, peu importe. Mais pour le panier bleu et sa place de marché, le marchandisage et la curation de contenu sera importante. Essentielle même. Et qu'elle sera peut-être le différentiateur et la clé du succès. Le panier bleu ne gagnera pas en créant une place de marché mais en réglant les enjeux des commerçants (coûts élevé des cartes de crédit, logistique, livraison, retours et publicité) et en offrant aux consommateurs une destination pour trouver des commerces et des produits québécois. 

En gros, il faut régler les problèmes du commerce de détail, et la technologie ne résoudra pas tous les problèmes à court terme...

WHY IT MATTERS: very useful reference of different technologies that power smart stores

WHY IT MATTERS: stores are changing and this guide reviews the different technologies, and solutions out there.

WHY IT MATTERS: retail stores must evolve to deliver value in an omnichannel world. Here's BCG's take on key experiences that stores must provide now that the transactional part is taken care of by eCommerce. This has implications in store design, branding, and of course technology.

WHY IT MATTERS: with ecommerce explosion during covid shutdown the retail revolution has accelerated and this report highlights some of the area of retailTech which have received most interest from venture capitalists.

WHY IT MATTERS: testing is always an issue and this ebook highlights advances in tools that help automate the process. Beware of inherent bias in this ebook!

WHY IT MATTERS: makes sense, turn your store into a broadcast studio and use your personnel to liveStreamShop to clients on the web and serve customers that drop in locally. The store reclaims a purpose, from a mini-warehouse to a service destination and broadcast center. This will require high bandwith, wifi or 5G and clienteling tools for vendors to answer client's questions about products, service or their orders. Fun times ahead.

WHY IT MATTERS: covid lockdown has frozen travel but one has to wonder: will we ever go back to the level of business travel that we had before? Isn't this really the promise of digital transformation, to let people work as efficiently from home (or the beach) as the office?

WHY IT MATTERS: very interesting DOs and DONTs about dynamic pricing. I see few retailers yet doing this at scale but with the growth of eCommerce one can expect this to become table stakes in few years. The operational requirements may be daunting if not done properly, so beware. A few good links in there but especially this one: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/our-insights/how-retailers-can-drive-profitable-growth-through-dynamic-pricing

WHY IT MATTERS: customer data platforms are starting to become more integrated into the web platforms. This book is a good summary of what's possible with a CDP. Just beware that there is an obvious bias towards the bloomreach solution - so do not discard the standalone version as they suggest!

WHY IT MATTERS: wow this post is eye opening, especially because it provides "non US" view of work from home. It shows how the covid shutdown has impacted everyone everywhere and how most homes are not designed to work in them. It means most people in most countries will want to back to the office or make big changes to their homes (if they can afford it)...

WHY IT MATTERS: eCommerce growth side effect is the need for distribution centers. This report highlights the expected growth in coming years along with land and labour issues that will arise as most orders will be hand picked - as opposed to more automated pallet pick in distribution centers.

WHY IT MATTERS: this short post is full of interesting charts including this one. It raises one important question: increased covid shutdown measures may have pushed eCom to become half of retail in UK (excl. grocery), does this mean the same for Quebec (which is a smaller market, much behind in eCom adoption than UK and US and possible Canada)?

Moreover the stats also indicate that covid has increased eCom adoption only by 2-3 quarters, not years as previously reported.

WHY IT MATTERS: a nice overview of event driven architecture. Take special note of PROs, CONs and when to use at the end - very important, EDA is not a silver bullet for all problems.

WHY IT MATTERS: Prime has 200M members worldwide, 143M in USA. Interesting to see what people use it for - but the survey hides an important fact: the real value of PRIME for Amazon.

I wrote about the value of PRIME in the past but this increase warrants a review of previous numbers. Back in 2016 when "only" 48M members, this report valued PRIME at 143B$.

www.vox.com/2016/10/5/13175272/amazon-prime-valuation-worth-143-billion-cowen-report

Also more here: blog.fmcs.digital/?q=amazon+prime

WHY IT MATTERS: ghost kitchens are natural evolution of eCommerce when applied to food delivery. This article explains the concept and how they are deploying into Walmart across Canada.

WHY IT MATTERS: found this example of displays that fail at McDonalds drive-thrus. It highlights the fact that digital transformation often means deploying new hardware in places where there not in the past. And that creates a huge number of issues in terms of design, maintenance, operations, etc. Very often not a big deal is planned but very much a big deal if not accounted for in the beginning. So think about cooling, electricity availability, repairs, software version updates, security, content upload, etc.

WHY IT MATTERS: a useful overview of different type of cognitive biais. Helpful to know especially as we get our information from the web and social networks...

WHY IT MATTERS: Google search made it easy for a generation of students to "borrow" content from others in order to get "inspiration" for their reports. Now Google also provides teachers with tools to automatically check what is unique and what is not in automated fashion. Why is this not included in WORD or Google DOCS to automatically verify what is truly unique in documents you receive, say from consultants like me? Oh no, many would find this not a good idea I'm sure... ;-)

WHY IT MATTERS: sometimes it is better to know what *not* to do.

WHY IT MATTERS: interesting to see that pick-pack-delivery providers are in the best position to monetize their direct customer relations, like banks & shopping malls before eCommerce.