Buy.at Roundup – Keynote notes
Yesterday I headed across to the buy.at speakeasy for their daytime and evening event. It was the first time I’ve managed to make the daytime part of Speakeasy and I’ll try and give an overview from the parts I can remember (should have taken notes!).
Firstly the Keynote was from a guy called Ian Jindal. I must admit that as much as I follow the “Web2.0” world I haven’t heard of him before and will keep a lookout in the future.
Ian was a very good speaker – he engaged with the audience well and cracked some jokes to keep the audience entertained. One of the things that I perhaps took the wrong was however is that Ian seemed to contradict himself by one minute saying that he felt that the country was in a recession and then later suggesting that clients should be spending money on Flash enhancements to their websites, citing this as an example:
I would have thought that if we were in a recession the cost of items would be an important factor. We’ve already apparently seen that the clothing retail market is constantly lowering it’s prices because of the level of competition and surely if (as suggested) more sites concentrated with features like on the Martin + Osa site it would drive the costs up? The main question that this raises is if enhanced features like this have a real effect on the conversion rate. I’m not convinced but would welcome some examples of where it may have happened.
There were some other neat things raised in the presentation – AMPL (attention profiling mark-up language) could have a big effect on the future of shopping in the future (perhaps another few years down the line) and the use of Microformats on google maps is something I would like to look more into.
The other interesting thing that Ian showed us was a demo of Pronto – a social shopping website. The firefox plugin was slightly concerning from an affiliate point of view - here is how it works:
1) You download their Firefox plugin
2) You visit a site like Amazon.com and view a product
3) A popup will then appear suggesting that the price can be found better elsewhere
Hopefully this won’t catch on too well as it could effect a sites conversion rate and send affiliates traffic elsewhere!
Have half-written a blog post about some of the other points so will try and get it up tomorrow.
June 21st, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Hi James - thanks for your comments and kind words.
On the Martin & Osa site (which is lovely) the points I wanted to make (sorry if I didn’t!) was that:
* this is the standard that customers would now expect, whether or not you do it on your own site
* it’s expensive - not only to produce but also to plan
* it probably won’t work consistently across a very broad, department-store site
* as affiliates, how do you get access to rich media from merchants?
* if you crack the above, how do you manage consistency?
Retailers are in a double bind since, as you point out no one wants to add more costs, yet if your competitors raise the bar then what are you to do?
Retailers are in the position of being squeezed by a slowdown in overall spending AND increased selectivity. This means that the ‘winners’ will do OK, maybe even grow, while others will see revenues fall off a cliff. My prediction is that there won’t be a gentle, evenly-distributed decline for all, but rather very polarised winners and losers…
Of course, we’re all working to be in the former group, not the latter
Cheers ikj
July 4th, 2008 at 9:47 am
I don’t suspect that will catch on, it would be really annoying to have it popping up all over the place!