Where are Online Retailers Focusing their Dollars?

The client I currently work with at Rosetta is a very large retailer and of course has been impacted by the economic downturn – hell, who hasn’t been?  Dollars are scarce and projects of all sizes are being evaluated and re-evaluated to ensure they will impact the bottom-line.

I have been spending more time over at shop.org, following the Strategy & Innovation 09 Forum that the National Retail Foundation (parent of shop.org) puts on each year.  Given the economic challenges that retailers are facing, this article on shop.org really caught my eye – Focusing Ecommerce Investing: Smartly Stretching Your Ecommerce Dollars While Still Innovating for Differentiation . It was a discussion with panelist from eBags, Patagonia and Bluefly.

Some similarities I found in each panelist’s comments about their focus -
- filtered navigation (guided navigation is different and somewhat specific to Endeca)
- SEO landing pages (marketing) and SEO in general
- better product content – descriptions, images, videos, make shopping exciting
- increase product lines
- reviews both online and across channels

Brulant is now Rosetta

I went on vacation working for Brulant and came back working for Rosetta (I knew it was happening).  A new brand rolled in with the new year and I am excited about it.  This is the 2nd acquisition that I have been through (Brulant acquired Xteric, Rosetta acquired Brulant) and the past experience has been positive and rewarding.  I look forward to the same over the next few months and hopefully years.  We even have this fancy new logo that you see in this post.  Reminds me of the Handspring logo a little bit.

All sorts of changes are taking place – new logos, new voicemail greetings, business cards, new email signatures and new email addresses too (old ones still forward stuff along).  For those that read Advertising Age there will be full page ads running in the magazine starting in the 12/29 issue.  Couple of exciting things noted in the ad…

- Serving 7 of the top 10 pharmaceutical/biotech companies in the US
- Driving over $5 billion of online retail transactions annually
- Creating and deploying more than 400 Personality® segmentations for the Fortune 1000
- Converting profitable customers for banks in 7 of the world’s top 10 economies

Take a look at the newly designed site as well…  www.rosetta.com

- Bill Weber

photo credit: rosetta.com