Pod1 Blog

Pod1 NYC is proud to announce the launch of a new ecommerce site for global luxury brand Derek Lam.

Derek Lam Int. was founded in New York in 2002. Lam’s vision for his label is to create clothes that are both luxurious and wearable, with a feminin but unfussy beauty about them.

The site was built using the Magento Commerce platform.

Visit the new site at http://www.dereklam.com

Working within the world of fast fashion means that we don’t always have the opportunity of flexing our usability muscles on some of the ecommerce websites that come out of our well oiled machine. So when I came across this little gem, it urged me to start this new series of posts of sites that put the user at the heart of the website.

1. Nabru: they sell sofas

- Loving the mega top-nav drop-down

- BIG buttons and BIG words make me and my grandmother so happy

- Visual checkout

http://www.nabru.co.uk

Good work fellas.

A while ago we had a heated discussion around whether we should support IE6 anymore or not. I created a monthly report on IE6 stats across Pod1s clients websites and took clients from each of the industries they represent in our portfolio with a focus, of course, on e-commerce. Here are the figures:

Traffic share of IE6 per month

Revenue per browser (last 3 months, this is different from the above)

Where we see a nice and steady decline in the traffic share (YEAH!), we see as well a rather constant level in revenue generated by IE6 users. IE6 users roughly generate 8% of the total revenue on our clients websites. As we see above IE6 contributes a total of about 9%.

This seems indicative for the luxury segment our clients operate in. Peak shopping hours are still around lunch break, 12:00-14:00 and shortly before closing time at around 16:00. I.e users shop from their workplace and large organisations such as banks simply don’t upgrade their entire IT with a more modern browser to allow their users to enjoy YouTube better. So if you work with Clients selling high value goods, you can keep the swanky Flash Intro the CEO is asking for but you will need to make sure you support IE6 as well.

After @i_am_cam suggested to break this down by revenue per browser I started looking at individual clients and how the browsers are spread. We can see that there are two shifts:

1. The more expensive the items the more Safari
2. The younger the audience the more non-IE

This article at Internet Retailing reports research that suggests millions of online purchases were abandoned last year, due to poor website performance.

It’s previously been reported that a 1 second dip in page load times can lead to a 7% dip in on site conversion rates, and it’s clear that a subjectively fast website makes more money than a subjectively slow one. The problem is that infrastructure can be expensive, especially if it needs to be maintained all year for the occasional seasonal / promotional spike.

There are solutions to this problem, though. We are working with content delivery networks to deliver the high volume, large files containing images, Javascript, style sheets and such like very cost-effectively, meaning that the load on the core web-server isn’t so heavy. Our smaller clients pool their hosting resources, so they all benefit from load-balancing, multiple servers, and the performance and fault tolerance that comes with that. This year more retailers will be able to benefit from a technology called ‘private clouds’ which will enable companies like Pod1 to offer scaleable hosting on demand, on their own farms of web-servers.

It’s important to be proactive about this, if you’re to avoid revenue slipping away that could be caught. We would suggest something like the following:

• Assess what your maximum load might be on your website (this is a simple spreadsheet task that we do frequently)
• Load test your current infrastructure, capturing performance data and lots of log file data during the test
• Fix the performance issues, upgrade the hardware where necessary, but often simple application changes can help, as can cheap upgrades like content delivery networks
• Re-run the load test

Load tests should be run periodically: upgrades can cause performance issues sometimes, and other factors (like the performance of the company running your domain name services) can change over time without being immediately recognised.

Pod1 and Predictive Intent (http://www.predictiveintent.com/) have signed a partnership agreement this week, as we begin a collaboration. Predictive Intent have very clever software for automated product recommendation and merchandising, which can be easily controlled through an administrative interface. Their software is already integrated with the Magento eCommerce platform, so it will be very easy for us to roll it out to any Pod1 client who would like to take advantage of it.

Magento Enterprise has features to allow rule-based creation of product associations, with a range of input data usable. Predictive Intent can take a retailer a step further using powerful, self-improving statistical algorithms to predict which product a customer needs to see more than any other.

Checkout the newly redesigned homepage for www.jigsaw-online.com. The new design was introduced to aid the merchandising of the site. Allowing the client to promote more products and offers direct from the homepage while allowing users easy access to the area of the site they require.

It’s also much better for SEO, the site has already improved rankings for a number of generic search terms thanks in no small part to the category navigation now being on the homepage.

Published on Netimperative, February 2010:

Extract: “After a burst of innovative activity in e-commerce over the past few years (from single page checkout to shop the catwalk), 2009 saw innovation all but grind to a standstill. While this is to a certain extent understandable due to the torrid time traditional retail has had through the recession it has lead to all e-commerce sites looking pretty much the same… and this isn’t good for the e-tail business. Is this going to continue into 2010 or are there already new ideas that are set to burst onto the retail scene? Fadi Shuman, co-founder of digital agency Pod1, looks at the outlook for e-commerce in 2010.”

Read full comment piece here

This is a really interesting approach – will it catch on?

what do you think?

See more here.

What a year for Gieves with the Friendly Fires wearing amazing outfits at The Brits!

Streamed directly to the site for the fans….
http://www.marcjacobs.com/#/en-us/home
Now thats how to do video!
LOVE IT!