Smarter catalogue management through automation: a primer for online retailers

September 27th, 2011 by Alex

This post is the first in a Keplar series for online retailers, showing you how to automate your way to a more profitable and responsive e-commerce business. Get in touch to discuss how to apply these techniques to your company.

At Keplar we have just completed a “soup-to-nuts” project launching a new image-heavy e-commerce site in the lifestyle space; the retailer has launched with 100 SKUs (each with 17 product images) with a plan to grow its catalogue aggressively to 1,000+ SKUs over the next 6 months. With these sorts of numbers, catalogue management – especially around product imagery – starts to be a real headache and also potentially a significant time/cost sink for the business: even something as simple as updating the watermark on each image becomes a major untaking.

The headaches of manual processes

The headaches of manual processes

Off-the-shelf technology solutions to streamline these processes already exist – typically referred to as Master Data Management systems, the leader in the field is probably Hybris with their Hybris PCM (product content management) system. But the Hybris technology stack is designed for major retailers with very large catalogues and/or complex product lifecycles – and it is priced accordingly; there’s no real equivalent for smaller retailers who want a better (i.e. less manual) approach to catalogue management than that provided by their ecommerce package.

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Our first open-source release: an e-commerce library for using PayPal with CodeIgniter

March 2nd, 2011 by Alex

A significant proportion of the work we do at Keplar involves helping companies to build out their ecommerce propositions. For speed and flexibility much of this work is done in PHP – or rather on well-established open-source technologies, such as CodeIgniter, MODx and Magento, which are built atop PHP.

To keep costs down for our clients and avoid “reinventing the wheel”, where possible we make use of existing libraries, plugins and extensions for these platforms. However this isn’t always possible, and sometimes we see an opportunity to improve (hopefully!) on the existing options.

At Keplar we’re keen to open-source any such code which we develop and own ourselves (i.e. isn’t part of a client deliverable) which we think could be useful for a wider audience. Open sourcing in-house technology has two clear benefits in our eyes: firstly it helps to support the open source ecosystems on which we depend, and secondly, the more eyes we can get on the code we use in the wild the better.

As our first tentative steps down this route, we are open sourcing a PayPal e-commerce library for CodeIgniter which we are already using in production on a couple of clients. We are releasing this library under the guise of an initiative which we are calling “Orderly” – we hope to release other e-commerce software and libraries under this banner in the future.

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Internationalising your e-commerce site with MaxMind customer geo-location

July 15th, 2010 by Alex

One of the major attractions of selling online is the ability to address global markets as well as your local market. Doing this effectively means localising key content (e.g. prices) for people visiting from countries around the world. The impact on sales if this is done correctly can be extremely positive: one client saw a 300% increase in international sales since implementing geo-located pricing and delivery. Nor is this overly complex to do, thanks to widely available global payment platforms such as PayPal and geo-location tools such as MaxMind.

Many countries

And so for the second in our series of technical blog posts, we are going to look at the opportunities to enhance your e-commerce site using geo-IP location. Geo-IP location sounds complicated but it is simply the process of determining where your individual website visitors are geographically located in the world; this is achieved by looking up each visitor’s IP address in a database which maps known IP addresses to individual countries or even cities.

As an online retailer, knowing where your website visitors are located allows you to provide them with a much more personalised shopping experience – for example, you could:

  • Show specific contact details for your visitor’s country
  • Price your product catalogue in your customer’s local currency
  • Automatically calculate delivery times and costs for their order

These sorts of personalisations work in two ways to improve your bottom-line: firstly, they increase the level of confidence and trust which a visitor feels in your site by showing that you can treat them as a ‘local’. And secondly, they reduce friction in the check-out process, removing difficult steps for the user such as converting the given currency into their own money. Using these techniques can significantly increase conversions among overseas visitors, as we have seen above.

On to the technology: although there are various providers of geo-IP address databases, we use MaxMind because it is free, simple to use and regularly updated. Also note that many e-commerce packages such as Magento or Prestashop have MaxMind integrations available already for free or low cost – check online to see if your e-commerce package has one too.

For this example we will be proceed as if we are integrating MaxMind directly with a simple PHP-based online shop; we will use MaxMind to display some simple internationalised information to your site visitor. In future blog posts we will explore some more sophisticated localisation approaches, to really drive more sales.

Now on to the technical steps…

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Office of Fair Trading publishes report examining online barriers faced by SMEs, authored by Plum Consulting and Keplar LLP

July 7th, 2010 by Yali

The OFT commissioned the report to build their own understanding of the opportunities and challenges small and medium businesses face online.  It is now being used as a springboard to seek the views of businesses either looking to or already trading online.

The report described the routes to markets for SMEs that wish to trade online, and commented on the economics of them.

The overall findings of the report are positive.  Innovation, often by large players (e.g. eBay, Paypal, Amazon, Google, Twitter and Facebook) has led to significant decreases in cost barriers to small businesses setting up online.

However, small businesses can face difficulties online, for example:

  • Small businesses that depend on particular providers are sensitive to system changes or loss of service,
  • The levels of innovation and cost reductions that have taken place online have not always been matched in those aspects of the value chain that remain offline.  (E.g. delivery of goods bought online.)

Download the report, or view the press release from the OFT.

Learn more about the research. Learn more about Plum Consulting.

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Fashion e-commerce report: best (and worst) practice from some of the leading online retailers

October 13th, 2009 by Yali

In this, the first of our e-commerce surveys, we look at a number of big brands in the fashion e-commerce space, to look at how well they sell online.  The purpose of the report is not to rate the retailers surveyed:  after all, they will know if they are under- or over-performing.  Rather, the purpose is to identify best practice in the area, so that other online retailers can learn from it, and avoid the imitating the worst.

E-commerce is an increasingly competitive space.  Winning companies in the space can beat the competition by getting the basics right:

  • Maximizing customer lifetime value
    • Encouraging customers to maximize the amount they spend on each visit
    • Encouraging customers back to the site to make repeat purchases
  • Maximizing visitor to customer conversions
    • Making it as easy as possible for visitors who are looking for specific items to find and purchase them
    • Presenting the right products in the right way so that visitors “browsing” are encouraged to make a purchase
  • Acquiring more visitors than the competition
    • Online retailers that have maximized their customer’s lifetime values, and visitor to customer conversion rates, can afford to outspend the competition on marketing because they get a better return on every visitor who comes to their site
    • This means they can profitably outspend their competition across marketing channels, acquiring more users taking share

The above approach should be bread-and-butter for any company looking to grow sales through their online site(s).  However, the simple truth, born out by our survey, is that many companies, including major online retailers, don’t get these basics right.

Download our Fashion E-commerce Report here.

Interested in growing your e-commerce revenue whilst improving your customers experience? Get in touch to discuss how to optimise your site.

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