Pod1 Blog

“Is that dress from Asos?” asked a girlfriend one clubbing night during my holiday back in Malta. “Yes,” I replied quite astonished she recognised it from thousands. “I had it saved in my favs. Looks fab on you.” “Thanks!” I replied not quite sure whether to be flattered or not.

Malta is a tiny island, for those who don’t know. It’s about the size of the Isle of Wight but has a population of half a million. Due to space limitation there are only a few ‘largish’ shopping malls and most fashion shopping is done from boutiques and outlets that line promenades and town streets. But this certainly doesn’t limit the fashion savvy Maltese woman. Believe me, the latter knows her stuff.

Online fashion retail is fast becoming a shopping haven worldwide and women in Malta are certainly making the most of it. ASOS alone ships its clothes and accessories to 167 countries. Its reported annual profits of £20.3m are higher than some analysts had expected. Group sales were up 35% to £223m in the year to 31 March while international sales surged 95% to £63m.

I was surprised to see Boohoo billboards splashed all over the tiny island. The early 20s to late 30s shoppers are increasingly becoming obsessed with online fashion shopping. My cousin for starters seems to get an extra kick from shopping at Boohoo, she just loves the fashion and it’s cheap.

The online fashion retail world is certainly globalising fashion trends as well as making it available to anyone who wants to join the club. You see it, you want it and it’s yours! Did you see that the fantastic pink ruffle dress S J Parker wore in STC II the movie? It’s a Halston Heritage and you can have it by visiting Harvey Nichols online shop.  Yes, that’s all it takes (not to mention the essential limitless credit card!)

The fashion industry is catching fire as online retailers take the lead and even more are throwing themselves into it. According to the IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index, total online sales rose 18% year on year to £5bn last month with clothing being one of the fastest growing online shopping sectors.

From a consumer perspective the quest for fashion is going beyond the physical in-store shopping   experience.  Shoppers are buying online at the expense of not trying before buying and forking out money to return any unwanted items, as happens with most returns policies except in the UK and US.

Having said that, while many women are die hard shopping goers they can’t help being enticed by what they see and is available online. What’s makes us want to shop our clothes online?  Do we think certain items aren’t available in store?  Are there more and better bargains online? Is the high we get from receiving a parcel through the post greater than trying an expansive dress in a store’s fitting room? Is it just because there is more choice online?

Feeding this appetite are agencies such as ours which continuously improve the online shopping experience making it even more attractive with tons of eye-catching web pages, even more fashion smartphone apps, creating virtual fitting rooms and sleek’n’easy checkouts.  All of this backed up by the retailer’s efficiency in stock management and delivery logistics, ultimately boosting the online shopper’s confidence.

Thanks to ecommerce shopping goes beyond the length and breadth of Oxford Street and stretches out to the four corners of the world. The fashion item you want is only a click away and a matter of a day or two before it’s delivered to your doorstep.

References:

http://www.mercurynews.com/fashion-style/ci_15881865?nclick_check=1

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/jun/09/asos-sales-rise

http://www.netimperative.com/news/2010/july/top-100-online-retailers-in-the-uk-how-do-they

Please vote for Pod1, nominated by the people (which we love) now all we have to do is win!

http://www.thenetawards.com/

We’re happy to announce the latest incarnation of the Barcelo Hotels website.

Rebuilt from the ground up, using our in-house Epifony CMS, the site is focused on delivering a much more simplified and intuitive user journey.

Once of the key features is the ability to filter criteria to meet the customer’s specific needs.

The new site also comes with a brand new, redeveloped, user-friendly booking engine.

As well as the hotels and bookings sections, the site comes with new areas to explore and book all the other hotel facilities available.

Barcelo Hotels has been a Pod1 client for over 6 years (previously called Paramount Hotels), with the very first website delivered in 2004, (and winning an NMA site of the week).

Website number 2 came in late 2006, and this won Travolution’s Best Hotel Website category.

We have high hopes with this latest release, but as with all new websites, the proof is in the pudding.

Check out the site here, and let us know what you think.

Today Facebook launched Facebook Places. Places gives users the ability to share where they are, discover interesting places nearby and find their friends. Places provides businesses with a presence on Facebook, encouraging their customers to share their recent visit by “checking in” as they arrive.

You can get started here: http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=1159

Following months of delays, Facebook has finalised the date for its removal of application boxes on profiles and the reduction in tabbed application widths on Pages. The tabs will be reduced to 520px in width (there won’t be a limit on height).

This will start to happen from August 23rd, according to a blog post from Facebook:

Boxes. We will notify users via messaging in profile boxes and in the Help Center that the “Boxes” tab, boxes on profiles and Pages, and application info sections will be going away.

Application Tabs. Next week, we will give Page admins the ability to preview their custom tabs in the new 520 pixel width so they can modify their layouts as needed. All profile and Page tabs will be resized automatically beginning the week of August 23.

This is important for any developers and marketers who are creating or updating applications and landing pages, in they need to make sure they are designing products to fit with the changes.

Good luck to Pod1 clients; Uniqlo, Jigsaw, Net A Porter, Kabiri, LKBennett, George at Asda, Marks and Spencer and Kurt Geiger who are amongst the nominees at this years’s Comapny Online Fashion Awards.

Get Voting!

company online fashion awards

Varien have launched version 1.9 of Magento Enterprise Edition: the details are on the Magento website at this link.

I watched the webcast that announced the release. There are some interesting new features, which I’ll summarise in this article.

Gift registry

There is a gift registry in the latest release that allows shoppers to create gift lists (a bit like wishlists) and then distribute them to their contacts. As items are bought from the list, they are removed from it, and they are all allocated the same shipping address, so they can be shipped to the owner of the list. This looks like great functionality for weddings and such like. We’ll be evaluating it properly soon, as some of our clients will definitely be interested in it.

Recurring purchases

Using Paypal, customers can now set up recurring purchases of items they want delivering every month, for example. We have a client who wants to offer a monthly delivery of one of their products to customers throughout the year, and this is perfect for them. The fact that it’s tied to Paypal may be an issue for some, but once again it’s something that will help many retailers.

Enhanced search

Varien made Solr an option for search in version 1.8 of Enterprise Edition. They’ve enhanced the search in the latest version with the option to have suggestions appear as searches are being typed in, and with auto-correction of mis-spellings in search terms.

Pod1 tends to implement Enterprise Edition with Fact-finder, a merchandisable eCommerce search solution that is comparable to Omniture Merchandising, Fred Hopper or Endeca, so it’s unlikely we’ll be implementing Solr for any of our clients soon, but it’s great that Varien are working with one of the leading open source search solutions, rather than trying to create a solution themselves: search is an often over-looked area of complexity in eCommerce, and it’s a good thing to get specialist help with.

Magento Connect

Magento Connect is now available in Enterprise Edition. Until now, if you wanted to install a Magento extension in Magento Enterprise you had to do it manually, which is a fairly complex task, best left to developers. Site owners can now browse and install extensions that have been developed to work with Magento Enterprise, in the same way they could with the Community Edition. We expect to see lots of development in this space: one example is that we’ll soon launch a version of our Sagepay extension that will be installable in Magento Enterprise using Magento Connect.

Full Page Caching

Varien have enhanced Magento Enterprise Edition’s full page caching so it will work with pages that contain dynamic content: the dynamic content will be generated on demand, while the static content is cached. They expect this enhancement to significantly improve site performance once again.

Payment Bridge and PCI Compliance

The last (and largest) enhancement I’m highlighting is the implementation of the Magento Payment Bridge, which is a step towards achieving PCI compliance for retailers. This is a very complex area. I’ve spoken to Varien about their intentions with the payment bridge, and I’m consulting with other industry experts as well, to formulate a clear position for our clients, but the key points I’ve identified so far are:

• Using Magento Enterprise Edition 1.9 isn’t going to ensure you’re PCI compliant: Magento itself no longer handles payments if you’re using the Payment Bridge, but you still have infrastructure and process work to do to achieve compliance.
• The Payment Bridge encapsulates all the payment functionality for payment systems that Varien have integrated it with, and at present that list is very short: none of the payment systems Pod1’s UK clients use has been integrated yet. Third parties can’t integrate other payment systems with the Payment Bridge.
• Retailers can still use other payment extensions, such as our Sagepay extension, and can still achieve PCI compliance through that route.

I’m preparing a presentation on this subject for our Magento Developers’ Meet-up tomorrow, and I’ll share that through the blog later this week.

Conclusion

Varien have come out with another very interesting and useful upgrade to Enterprise Edition. Some of its features are very useful to our clients, and we’ll be implementing them over the coming months. The PCI situation remains complex, and we’re continuing to provide advice to our clients on an individual basis.

Wow how quickly time flies! Here is a picture of ‘Team Amanda’ all glammed up at Net-A-Porter’s 10th birthday party – we had an amazing time.
Thank you Net-A-Porter!!

We have been keenly following the stories about the 10th anniversary as many are, but we were especially please to see that another of our clients ‘Kurt Geiger’ appeared in the outfit chosen by the NAP Facebook fans for 2010. Well Done KG!

Happy Birthday to all at Net-A-Porter and long may you reign!

The rise of social media is shaking up the traditional ecommerce model, with consumers helping to dictate price and availability of products via new ‘social commerce platforms’. Fadi Shuman, co-founder of Pod1, looks at a new kind of social buying in ecommerce.

Read the full article on netimperative

Published by .net, August 2010.

- Main feature discusses opporunities the iPad brings to Ecommerce.

- How to…Choose the right ecommerce platform

Download pdf here