WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

WHY IT MATTERS: an interesting guide to help select the right tools and solutions in a world of rapidly evolving solutions.

WHY IT MATTERS: digital impacts all industries including those are more dependant on "relations" like wellness.

WHY IT MATTERS: interesting to see that software solutions that reach maturity - such as ERPs - have a tendency to specialize. This quadrant highlights leaders in a specific market (product centric enterprises). I wonder when we will start to see the same with eCommerce... Not that specialized solutions don't exist but that the industry remains so immature that companies are in their first or second versions of eCommerce and thus gravitate to generalist solutions like shopify, magento, etc.

WHY IT MATTERS: as marketplaces become popular, finding a specific product in a catalog of millions of products will become harder and harder. The holy grail is visual search: snap a picture of something and get some AI to help you find something similar, or that matches well with that. eBay has made tests, Google lens has returned amazing results in my recent experience. Not sure what Amazon is doing but I assume it is top of their list.

Facebook is a major player in this game as it wants to make marketplace the shopping destination (don't forget it owns instagram as well). So the investment in grokNet is critical and recent results appear promising, though not yet perfect. 

So if you build a marketplace, as we are for panier bleu, then this is an area of innovation we cannot afford to bypass.

WHY IT MATTERS: warning! this article is not about your typical "robots will rule retail" or "everything has to be AI driven unless you die". Well, in some parts it is.

The reality check that retailers - and their technology vendors - must make is: retail is difficult, focused on the bottom line, with no appetite for innovation with short term results. Retail innovators must find a way to experiment while staying focussed on the bottom line.

Best quote: "‘I think the majority of the problems come from the unwillingness, perhaps the fear, of investing in something that
doesn’t automatically bring a load of cash onto your balance sheet."

WHY IT MATTERS: technology is the last frontier for retail as the sector has failed to make investments in recent years, staying with more traditional store design. Now this is not possible anymore and this article from McKinsey highlights key elements with more info links.

WHY IT MATTERS: the future of ecommerce lies in marketplaces it seems - I know as we are knee deep in this for Le Panier Bleu. Retailers face the challenging task of creating their eCommerce presence by being present where customers are. This means your product catalog has to be visible on *multiple* marketplaces, from your ecom store to Panier bleu, to Amazon to Google shopping, etc. Thus you need to manage your product information - descriptions, prices, inventory, etc. - in a central location. This is what a PIM is all about.

WHY IT MATTERS: interesting to see the challenges that people find with their eCommerce solutions. As with all surveys, take with grain of salt.

WHY IT MATTERS: headless solutions are all the rage in web development, including eCommerce. This ebook pulls it all together with good insights and analysis followed by overview of 14 tools. Useful.

WHY IT MATTERS: no one knows how stores will change but this eBook brings some interesting store concept and retailTech examples. Don't expect too much from the title though...

WHY IT MATTERS: acquisition of magento by Adobe has taken a few years to integrate but it seems that the process is over. This comparison is quite high level but provides good insights to get started. The net-net: magento ain't your open source project anymore and has moved into the corporate grade solution, with the good (support, features, integration to Adobe portfolio, ...) and the bad (pricing, inflexibility, ...) that comes with it.

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: 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: 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: 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: this is a useful overview of solutions but also of the complexities that running a marketplace imply. Pretty much my daily headaches for the past few months... ;-)

WHY IT MATTERS: this is old news but a new picture that shows what it looks like when you track your delivery in China. The image is from March 2021 even though the article is from 2020. So it seems to remain after a year. Not sure when it will be part of the UBER app... ;-)

WHY IT MATTERS: the scores and the ranking is not important. This list is meaningful because it shows just how broad and deep the automation has become in retail stores. Expect to see a lot of those in your local shopping destination.

WHY IT MATTERS: eCommerce evolution requires the equivalent of shopping malls, to draw customers into a single location. This list of top 100 solutions is very informative.

WHY IT MATTERS:  a great summary of the solution but also the payment processing in general.

WHY IT MATTERS: not most recent but still relevant reference architecture for ecommerce. Not many of those lying around... ;-)

WHY IT MATTERS: an interesting list of retailTech solutions, with recent updates.

WHY IT MATTERS: bear in mind that this list is pre-covid. But with so many retailers looking for solutions I felt this list to be useful. As with all WAVEs, have a big grain of salt and use the reviews , market positioning, etc. to prepare your own evaluations. And don'T discard solutions because they are not on the list. This is for B2B.

WHY IT MATTERS: bear in mind that this list is pre-covid. But with so many retailers looking for solutions I felt this list to be useful. As with all WAVEs, have a big grain of salt and use the reviews , market positioning, etc. to prepare your own evaluations. And don'T discard solutions because they are not on the list. This is for B2C.