The promise of multichannel retailing

In a year of doom and gloom for retailers, the continued emergence of online sales has been a bright spot. Why then do so few companies get true multichannel retailing right?

OCTOBER 2009 • Steve Noble, Amy Guggenheim Shenkan, and Christiana Shi

Source: Retail Practice

If one certainty about economic downturns is that they end, another is that traditional retailers recover slowly. In the United States, for example, only 25 percent of drugstores, 40 percent of mass retailers, and 60 percent of specialty-apparel retailers returned to pre-recession growth rates within five years of the 2001 downturn.¹ That’s time retailers can’t afford. The period when an economy emerges from a recession is pivotal to determining retail’s winners and losers, and our research suggests one of the keys to securing this success is to maintain investments throughout the business cycle. We believe that for companies coming out of the current recession, investing to build robust multichannel capabilities provides an attractive opportunity for retailers to set themselves apart from their peers.
For all the difficulty retailers have experienced in the past year, online sales have continued to be a bright spot: while overall sales have generally fallen in the United States, online sales have actually been increasing since the start of 2009.² In fact, the percentage of total sales made online continues to increase, and our research also shows that more and more consumers are using the Internet to investigate products they later buy in stores. By 2011, we believe the Internet will play a role in more than 45 percent of US retail sales, as either a research tool or a sales channel. What’s more, consumers who shop across a number of channels—physical stores, the Internet, and catalogs—spend about four times more annually than those who shop in just one (exhibit). Companies that get multichannel retailing right can enjoy larger profit margins and yearly revenue growth more than 100 basis points higher than companies that don’t.

So, why do so few retailers actually get it right? The challenge is that while making sales through a number of independent (or, at best, loosely connected) channels is relatively easy, capturing the full benefits of multichannel retailing in its true form involves much more than simply publishing a catalog or replicating an in-store product assortment online and assuming that consumers will click and buy. The kind of multichannel retailing that fuels sustainable growth and margin expansion requires a tightly integrated strategy across all channels, including physical stores, catalogs, the Internet, and mobile—and even homes, in the case of certain service offerings. Each channel needs to play a clear (and often quite distinct) role in supporting and reinforcing a retailer’s overall brand equity.
To understand the different ways this approach works in practice, consider the multichannel strategies of the Swedish home products group IKEA and the US department store chain JCPenney. IKEA uses its Web channel primarily to support its stores—in fact, it does not offer online sales in many countries where it operates. Instead, ikea.com primarily provides information that reinforces the company’s reputation for innovative products and low prices, as well as real-time store inventories and shelf locations that help customers plan store visits. By contrast, JCPenney has leveraged its legacy as a successful catalog merchant into a tightly integrated cross-channel commerce offering. Stores are outfitted with Web kiosks, and all point-of-sale terminals have Web access so customers can easily purchase product categories, styles, and sizes not available in stores. JCPenney is even testing a system that allows customers to scan coupons in the store that have been sent directly to their mobile telephones. What’s important is that each of these channels builds upon JCPenney’s overall “fashion at a value” brand equity by highlighting exclusive brands and deep promotional pricing.
As illustrated by these two examples, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to developing a strong multichannel strategy, but in our experience successful efforts typically involve many of the following steps:

• Understand how consumer, technology, and competitive trends are evolving. Consumer shopping behavior, for example, has changed dramatically given the ease and power of Internet access.³ Companies must adjust their marketing mix and channel strategies to better serve those customers.
• Develop a clear sense of the growth pockets being targeted. Is the multichannel strategy designed to acquire new customers online, or is the ambition to capture a greater share of the overall spending of current in-store customers by also meeting their online shopping needs?
• Sell the right products through the right channels by tailoring each category’s product assortment to the economics of different channels and making it easy for customers to buy what they want, when they want, where they want. Critical as well are sound pricing logic across channels and features such as the ability to order from Web sites while in stores.
• Understand the value of growth options and rank them by their potential returns and relative difficulty. Systematically analyzing different options enables companies to make trade-offs, such as deciding whether to invest in mobile commerce or instead to aim for driving higher in-store sales.
• Define success, measure performance, and reward it. Retailers need to focus on capturing that success by changing the organizational design, incentives, or both. To change behavior, you must first change incentives.

None of these methods is easy, and we’re working with companies to shape the focus and extent of their multichannel investments, understand and maximize financial impact on a category-by-category basis, and identify and overcome the hurdles that can prevent companies from unlocking multichannel’s full potential. We firmly believe that getting multichannel right is worth the effort: if correctly planned and executed, a truly integrated multichannel strategy will help a retailer not only maximize its share of a customer’s wallet over time but also emerge from the current recession stronger and more rapidly than its peers.

https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/The_promise_of_multichannel_retailing_2448 

Managing IT transformation on a global scale: An interview with Shell CIO Alan Matula

Shell’s executive vice president and CIO talks about the company’s never-ending transformation process.

MARCH 2010 • Leon de Looff

Source: Business Technology Office 

Over the last decade, Shell has been undergoing an IT transformation that is remarkable for the scope of change it is seeking in one of the world’s largest and most complex organizations—one with 25 business portfolios and operations across more than 100 nations. The transformation is defined by four phases, says Alan Matula, executive vice president and group CIO.
The first was about going back to basics—allowing Shell’s IT leaders to better align IT with the business units by stabilizing operations, establishing project discipline, and tracking costs, people, and assets. Matula says that this solid foundation is essential to any successful IT transformation.
In the second phase, the targets were costs and complexity. Shell rationalized and consolidated infrastructure, substantially reduced the number of business applications, improved procurement procedures, and aggressively offshored. It also strengthened governance by recognizing that a real dialogue with the businesses was needed and recruited high-grade talent to conduct it.
Investments in the future formed the third phase: innovation, functional improvements, and business-driven multiyear investment programs to help the businesses meet their targets (for more, see our video interview with Matula below, “Staying on IT’s cutting edge,” or download a PDF of the video transcript). Shell implemented strategic sourcing to consolidate hundreds of suppliers, leaving just 11 key partners with whom it outsourced selected functions. Matula says the change in direction allowed Shell to work with suppliers, “doing things that are not only good for Shell but that also are innovative in the marketplace and help the industry.”

Shell is now geared up for the harvest-and-sustain phase, to ensure that the benefits of its IT investment are realized. “IT is more important and intense than ever before and that requires an ongoing effort to transform IT and improve its agility, to make the business more productive and competitive,” Matula told McKinsey’s Leon de Looff in a recent interview (in The Hague) covering Shell’s IT transformation, challenges, and the many lessons learned so far.
The Quarterly: Shell has been in the midst of an IT transformation for several years now. Can you tell us about how it started and about the approach you took?
 

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	Four steps to a successful IT transformation Step 1: Put transformation on a solid footing by stabilizing IT operations, enforcing project discipline, and tracking costs, people, and assets. Step 2: Take a phased approach—lock in IT efficiencies and reduce complexity early on; then invest in improvements to help businesses meet their goals. Step 3: Get business unit support for major change by maintaining precise accountability for the delivery of benefits and by monitoring progress frequently. Step 4: Select or recruit top IT talent for the interface in concert with business units to help build the trust needed to sustain transformation.

Alan Matula: It was a phased approach that started in the early 2000s with a drive to get back to basics. I was very fortunate to be a part of that effort from the beginning, continuing over the four phases, since I held positions as a business CIO and now as group CIO. The phases addressed specific goals: back to basics, rationalization and consolidation, investing in the future, and harvest and sustain. (For more, see sidebar “Four steps to a successful IT transformation.”)
The Quarterly: What do you need to launch an IT transformation at this scale?

Alan Matula: You have to start out with a solid foundation that builds credibility with the business. That includes stabilizing operations, implementing project discipline, and tracking costs, assets, and people. If you don’t have the foundation, then don’t even start.


The Quarterly: What did Shell do to be sure that the businesses were aligned on this?
Alan Matula: Right from the start, we deliberately put “business at the center” of what we do. But the key is that we have been able to strike a balance between an IT foundation that is standard across business units, while differentiating and catering to specific business needs—areas like high-performance computing for our exploration businesses.
The Quarterly: Did the move back to basics stir up any resistance from the businesses? And if so, how did you deal with that?
Alan Matula: We made the application portfolio transparent, showing the businesses the real cost and the complexity of what they had. They figured out pretty quickly that it didn’t fit the changing business models and competitive conditions in the industry, or the globalization agenda the company had set for them.
The Quarterly: It must have been complicated given your historical legacy?
Alan Matula: You have to remember, we came from a nation-based operating model that was successful for many years. We’re turning that model on its head. So you basically go nation by nation, region by region, and replace a lot of the legacy assets and start to initiate your standardization agenda to attack costs and complexity.
The Quarterly: CIOs debate whether IT should follow business change or lead it—in your case, for example, by furthering Shell’s globalization through IT standardization. What is your view?
Alan Matula: I see it somewhat differently. IT is like cement to the standardization activities. If you don’t cement changes with IT, then over time they will erode and revert back. IT provides the transparency that you need for driving standardization in a large, diversified corporation like Shell.
The Quarterly: You’re now a few years into the campaign. What has changed?
Alan Matula: We went from hundreds of national enterprise resource programs to about six to eight core platforms that do the heavy lifting in terms of business transactional capability. For example, we now have one HR system, one health system, and three or four big application landscapes per business sector.
The Quarterly: And what about the applications that have to be tailored for business needs?
Alan Matula: In addition to the core platforms, we divided the business into portfolios around key sectors such as upstream, downstream, and corporate functions. But to really align IT directly to the business strategy, you need to go one layer deeper. So for downstream operations, that means retailing and manufacturing; for upstream, it’s exploration and production. In total, we have 25 business portfolios.
The Quarterly: Are these managed differently?
Alan Matula: That’s where we’ve put our key talent in terms of IT capability. Because of their business domain knowledge, these are the people who really get a seat at the table with business leadership teams. They understand the business strategies and can create the differentiating IT on top of the business transactional layer. A lot of what we consider competitively differentiating is kept in house. Even though you read a lot about outsourcing, the key differentiating systems are still kept and managed specifically within Shell.
The Quarterly: Stepping back a bit, how does a CIO build the business case—one that demonstrates the benefits of a broad transformation that involves major investments and a lot of change?
Alan Matula: We’ve learned for sure that when you make the business case, you have to ensure accountability for delivery of the benefits. You need the names of the people who are going to extract the gains. Then you need to track benefits on an ongoing basis. We’re piloting quarterly monitoring where you look at an applications portfolio and examine where benefits are materializing and where they aren’t.
Beyond that, you have to have the right people at the business interface. They are invaluable. You will not find a CIO who doesn’t struggle with finding talent for the business interface. We’ve invested in our IT people through a learning program delivered by a business partner program.
The Quarterly: What role is IT playing in Shell’s innovation efforts?
Alan Matula: We review each of our major portfolios every 18 to 24 months, focusing on the key technologies needed to stay in the game as well as what is needed for competitive differentiation. We have done some very innovative things—in telematics, for example, using wireless technology to monitor auto fuel consumption and efficiency. But the key to innovation is having a real dialogue at the business-portfolio level to understand where technology is important. That means a change of mind-set and skills, moving from a focus on the basic infrastructure of business administration to a position as close to the business leaders’ needs as possible.
The Quarterly: What was the reasoning behind consolidating suppliers and outsourcing? How did your thinking evolve?
Alan Matula: We actually tested outsourcing early in phase two, but we backed away from it because we didn’t want to outsource IT problems we hadn’t fixed. Once we were comfortable with our progress, we started the third phase. We spent almost a year bringing in suppliers—10 or 15 of them—exploring what was working, what wasn’t, and what needed changing. It was then that we latched onto multisourcing as a model. For example, in infrastructure, we now have three suppliers that are capable of providing services across the board. This provides us with flexibility and agility as we evolve the delivery model to respond to the changing IT market and Shell business needs. We benchmark the suppliers, and we have written contracts that are very flexible.
The Quarterly: Is there an optimum number of suppliers for a company like Shell?
Alan Matula: Things do not stay the same forever. But to give you a sense of our thinking, before we consolidated our infrastructure suppliers, we had about 1,500 different contracts, covering licenses, hardware, and services, with an outsourcing model that was very fragmented. We’re now down to three infrastructure suppliers, and these are an integral part of what we call our ecosystem of key suppliers.
The Quarterly: Was there a driving philosophy behind the new outsourcing model and the new ways of working with suppliers?
Alan Matula: We started with the idea that we wanted 70 percent of our spending to be external. Of that, we wanted 80 percent to be focused on the top 11 suppliers. We put those 11 into three groups: First, there are the foundation suppliers, those in which we make long-term bets—Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP. Then there’s the infrastructure group, with three bundles—AT&T, HP, and T-Systems—for networks, end-user computing, and hosting of storage, respectively. And finally we have four application services suppliers—Accenture, IBM, Logica, and Wipro. What we’re doing differently is bringing all 11 of them together to work as a collective.
The Quarterly: Tell us more about that last point.
Alan Matula: About two years ago, we began meeting with the ecosystem suppliers every quarter. We started out slowly, defining golden rules and how we operate, with the ambition of actually doing things together that not only are good for Shell but that also are innovative in the marketplace and help the industry.
The Quarterly: What kinds of innovation?
Alan Matula: The boundaries between the traditional suppliers are blurring. Some traditional hardware suppliers are going into software and vice versa. Others are getting into the data center business. As we started to give our top 11 suppliers some big challenges, that gave rise to some innovative approaches. You’re starting to see all suppliers wanting to play differently by collaborating to improve the overall delivery to Shell. I think it’s going to be an exciting time as we continue to push current industry norms to drive greater degrees of collaboration, change, and innovation.
The Quarterly: You think of IT in terms of phases. What is the next frontier for IT transformation at Shell?
Alan Matula: The next phase in our transformation will be a shift to harvesting the benefits from the assets we have put in place—a new system for HR should last 15 years. So the goal now is to leverage these assets to improve business performance. That’s a different model of change. It forces us to be more intimate with the business, actually putting business operations and IT operations side by side. In the project mode of recent years, you could keep some distance as you restructured, but in the harvest-and-sustain mode, you have to work to optimize the business processes, with IT delivering business performance improvements. The structural approach will be different, and that’s what we’re now exploring.
The Quarterly: Going forward, since you’re trying to capture benefits outside IT, you need a different steering mechanism and metrics beyond just reducing IT unit costs, right?

Alan Matula: The pressure to reduce unit costs will never go away in IT. But when you get to harvest and sustain, it’s about smarter demand management, to make sure you are using only the IT that you require and are doing only the IT projects that you need to do. It’s also about a different set of metrics on the business side, and the ultimate art of this is talking to the businesses in their own terminology, to show exactly where IT contributes to their goals. We’re testing a couple of portfolios to see if we can do this. It’s something that every CIO would love to be able to do.
The Quarterly: Are you doing your own IT research to develop innovations for the business?
Alan Matula: At the beginning of each year, we carve out key technology areas or domains that we want to mine—things like sensors, high-performance computing, new ways of working. We work with the external providers as well as internally searching for areas where we can make disruptive, differentiating strikes. In terms of structure, we have put all IT technology research into a projects-and-technology organization with a chief technologist whose job is to look for those technology strikes that add the most business value. We want to send the message that the CTO is a business partner at a very different level from standard IT. The projects-and-technology organization is split from the rest of the IT function, and there’s a cut line between the big technology plays and supporting staff—20 percent of the total staff—versus the more incremental activities that remain in the traditional IT line, or 80 percent of the staff.
The Quarterly: You have recently changed how you govern IT, with the business unit CIOs now reporting to the IT function and no longer to the business heads. Is this the optimal model?
Alan Matula: It’s really about maturity. In the early phases, there was no way you could consolidate IT under one function. We needed to build credibility with the businesses, and they needed to take ownership of their project portfolios. In today’s phases, maturity starts to blossom. The CIOs get more and more credibility. As long as they still have that seat at the business table, are heavily engaged, and serve on business forums and leadership teams, then that is what is really important. If that starts eroding, then we’ll go back to the previous model.
The Quarterly: The change in governance more or less coincided with the start of the recession?
Alan Matula: That’s right. I now have more levers to pull when it comes to costs and agility. The new governance model has allowed us to move faster and make decisions without working across different business lines to get everyone to agree. Furthermore, we can move IT resources around easier and more quickly.
The Quarterly: In the financial crisis, some CIOs have focused primarily on cutting IT spending, while others have focused on IT’s important role in cutting business costs. What has been your experience?
Alan Matula: You have to do both. We have, for example, made use of the network for telephone calls, and we have transformation projects in place that use technology so we can work virtually. But it’s a balance. You need to keep driving down pure IT costs on a unit basis while also providing technology that drives business costs down. Of course, it’s always hard to tell that latter story, since it’s often difficult to determine the full cost of a business process.
The Quarterly: While you have pushed standardization and sourcing to the maximum level, is it still possible to squeeze more costs and inefficiencies out of IT operations?
Alan Matula: There are new models emerging, based on cloud computing and software as a service, that are going to have an impact. Beyond that, we have to be a lot more selective about what projects we do, and most of all we have to work for continuous improvement to get the full potential from our IT assets.
The Quarterly: What are the lessons you have learned from this transformation? What might you have done differently and what would you tell other CIOs?
Alan Matula: IT is more important and intense to the enterprise than ever before, and that essentially requires an ongoing effort to transform IT; there is always another phase. To support that mental model, the first thing is to never lose the perspective that you’re here to make the business more productive and more competitive. Our catchphrase, “business at the center,” keeps us grounded. Our position today is a reflection of the tight integration that we have with the business, combined with the efforts of key support functions like HR, finance, and procurement.
A second thing is that you’re only as good as the talent that you have. For instance, in the robust sourcing of infrastructure and applications we have put in place, the people at the interface are very important. They manage the critical supplier relationships with CEOs and top executives at these firms, and they have the technical know-how to help guide the suppliers.
Finally, if you don’t have the basics right, you won’t have any credibility. It only takes one bad “go live” on a project or a flaw in your basic delivery capabilities to set you back very quickly.

https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Managing_IT_transformation_on_a_global_scale_An_interview_with_Shell_CIO_Alan_Matula_2559

Are You Ready To Trade Futures?

So, you want to trade futures in the hopes of speculating correctly and becoming wealthy in the process. The question you have to answer is: Are you prepared and ready to learn how this dynamic market works?
Futures do not trade in shares like stocks. They trade in contracts. Each futures contract has a standard size that is set by the futures exchange it trades on. For example, the contract size for gold futures is 100 ounces. That means when you are buying one contract of gold, you are really controlling 100 ounces of gold. If the price of gold moves $1 higher an ounce, that will affect the position by $100 ($1 x 100 ounces). You need to check each commodity or futures contract since each of them is unique.

Win or Lose
Many people begin trading without fully understanding the fundamentals of the contract. Futures trading is a zero-sum game. For each trade there is a winner and a loser. Many companies and professional fund managers use futures to hedge their other positions. They are using their futures contract to reduce the risk of their portfolio. This could be the jet fuel prices for an airline or gold produced by a mining company who wants to fix in a specific sale price. While future contracts protect against the downside of price fluctuations, they also limit potential upsides as well.
When you trade futures for their own sake, it is like playing in a casino. The floor traders, futures exchanges and a few experienced traders with deep pockets win in the long term. Most other traders end up losing their capital and leave poorer and disappointed.
Long-term success in futures trading comes from mastering three disciplines. If you are a successful stock trader, you are probably familiar with these rules. First, you need a proven trading process that works for futures trading. Next, proper money management techniques can go a long way to helping you win the futures trading game. Finally, any time your emotions control your trading you are likely to lose.

Trying to master these techniques overnight while learning the futures game is foolish. You would be better off just giving your money to the experienced traders, as it would save on your emotional wear and tear. Before venturing into futures trading, be sure you are ready to take on those with more experience and success.

The "Are You Ready" Checklist
How do you know if you are ready to trade futures? Ask yourself these questions to see if you believe you are ready.
Trading Process
Do you have a proven trading process that applies to futures trading? Keep in mind you are making bets on the trend in a futures contract where you compete with experienced pros who use their own trading process.
Ask yourself these questions to help you decide:

* Is your trading process focused on a long or short time frame? Futures contracts are available for many time frames creating opportunities that can be exploited.
* Do you use technical or fundamental analysis or both? Most professionals employ a blend of both methods, with one confirming the other.
* Do you have a special knowledge of a futures market that gives you an added advantage? For example, if you work in the energy industry you might know more than most about the important factors that determine the price of energy.
* Do you always use a well-defined trading plan that you follow without fail? Disciplined trading helps to level the playing field.
* Does your trading process recognize the market trend? Trading with the trend is a core strategy for futures traders.

* Does your trading process work well in up and down markets? Futures' trading does not depend on a bull or bear market. You can trade either way, depending on the trend in the futures instrument you are using.
A well-thought trading process gives you an edge. Be sure to use it.
Money Management
Good money management is necessary for success in any trading situation. It is especially important in futures trading.
* Is your risk-reward method clearly articulated and used? For example, do you know in advance how much of your available capital you are willing to lose when trading futures? The corollary to this rule is being sure your process defines how much you can lose on each trade and that you enforce this rule.
* Each trader views risk from his or her own perspective. Are you aggressive or conservative? Either view works as a futures trader. Just be sure to sustain that view with each trade.
* Do you employ risk reduction techniques without fail? Proven techniques, such as position sizing and stop losses, are essential. Successful traders are willing to admit when they are wrong and get out of the trade.
Money management provides the tools to help you maximize your winning trades and minimize your losing ones. That is the secret to long-term profitable futures trading.
Emotional Control
Lack of control over your emotions is one of the primary reasons traders fail. Fear, anxiety, and greed are common traits in everyone. Keeping them under control is an ongoing effort. When they take over; your trading results will suffer.
* How do you develop confidence in your trades? Do you use gut feel or good research? Confidence based on solid research helps to remove the emotion for the trading decision. Reading a blog or following someone else's lead without knowing why they are making the trade is a recipe for failure.

* If you are unsure, do you trade anyway? Executing a bad trade is worse than not trading at all. The excitement of making a trade that does not make sense makes no sense.
* When you have a losing trade, what is your reaction? If you follow your trading discipline and close the trade you have your emotions under control. On the other hand, if you change your mind and begin to hope for a better outcome, you are losing control, setting the stage for a larger loss.
The best traders never let their emotions enter into their trading. When they suspect their heart is overruling their mind, they stop until the feeling passes. It serves them well and can do the same for you.
The Bottom Line
Trading futures is fraught with risk. Since the vast majority of futures traders fail to make consistent profits, anyone who is considering trading futures should take a step back and ask themselves a number of questions before proceeding. If after careful consideration, you wish to proceed, do so knowing that you are embarking on an exciting venture that will test your trading discipline to the utmost.

http://www.forbes.com/2010/05/13/how-to-trade-futures-personal-finance-futures_3.html

The Online Store for the New Decade

From jewelry designers to musicians, from shop owners to authors, everyone is looking for a way to sell products or services online. How do you begin, and what do you need to know about setting up and managing an online store for your business? Whether you do it yourself or hire a firm, you are the expert at what you sell, and your involvement is crucial to the success of your web store.
It's Not Magic
Whether you are considering using a prepackaged solution or building your website on an open source shopping system, it is important to recognize something right upfront: You need to be involved. You will need to take the time to create your list of products. Each product will need a unique item number, product title, price and description.  Depending on what you are selling, you may have more fields than these. If you're using a prepackaged solution, some services will provide you with a spreadsheet template to follow.
Beyond the data, you will need images of your products or icons for digital items. You may need to spend some time familiarizing yourself with an image editing application to correctly size your product images to match the layout or design of your website. Keep in mind that if you plan to show jewelry, clothing or furniture in other colors, you will need images of those items. Web applications do not magically recolor photos, so you need to have photos taken of products in other colors or have a graphic expert recolor your products. If you are selling a digital product like music or e-books, you'll need to create sample files to provide your visitor. For example, offer two pages of your e-book in a pdf format or an edited 30-second sample of your music for review.

Technology Connections
We all need to accept credit cards to sell online, and there are a variety of ways to do this today. You can go to your bank and open a merchant account or use a merchant service company. Credit card processing can also be supplied by the prepackaged solution or from a third-party service like PayPal or Google. When making this decision, think about your audience. Will they be comfortable jumping off your website to an external processing service like PayPal or Google? You can integrate many processors into your shopping cart, but it is important to understand that people are human and they will make mistakes. Mistyping a credit card number and entering a wrong ZIP code are frequent human errors, so be sure you test the error notifications on your website. When evaluating shopping systems, do not assume international orders are allowed. This may be a feature that needs to be customized.
Additional technology connections may also be needed to provide you and your audience with the most accurate costs. For instance, how are you shipping your products? Not all shopping carts integrate with every shipping service, and if you are planning to ship your products, you will want this feature integrated into your website so that buyers' postal codes can be checked against your products' weights and shipping zones. Many small businesses run into a lower profit margin because their shipping isn't calculated properly.
Social Features
Aside from managing inventory, adding images and connecting your products to shipping systems, your customers are looking for more. Customer reviews have become standard in today's e-stores, and they serve two purposes: They can help increase sales, and they provide an opportunity for your customers to give you feedback.
Providing customers with wish list tools for sharing their interests with friends and family is not a standard feature on most e-commerce sites, but for certain websites this feature can help your customers get what they want and even share their lists on social sites.
Fresh content about your products is a must for any site. Plan your site around sharing information about the best uses of your products or highlight different customer stories about how your e-book impacted their lives. The message needs to stay fresh, so plan your site with more than just a shopping catalog--plan it with a sense of community.
Building an e-commerce site today is not just about offering the latest and greatest product or the lowest price. You'll want to build a following and make it easy for your team to manage the growth. The two most important things to remember are that not every feature will be available out of the box and that you will need to be a participant in your success.

http://www.entrepreneur.com/ebusiness/sellingonline/article206448.html

The Next Wave of Digital Marketing Trends

Sometimes the most important small business marketing tools and technologies start out as expensive enterprise solutions exclusive to big brands and agencies; only much later do they become affordable and accessible to small businesses.
During a recent trip to San Francisco, I stopped by the tradeshow floor at Ad:Tech and found myself staring into the not-too-distant future of small business marketing. I didn't have a chance to see everything Ad:Tech had to offer, but I did have time to talk with a few innovative companies offering solutions that are sure to influence the way small businesses approach marketing.
Here's what I found that's worth sharing along with some tips for getting ready to adjust to new trends.

Innovation No. 1: Online Display AdvertisingBanner ads may sound like an antiquated way to get noticed, but actually display advertising is becoming much more interesting due to two important trends.
One such trend is better local ad targeting. Several companies, such as Local.com, LinkedIn and Facebook, have announced that they're getting into the local targeting game by offering geography-based advertising along with the standard demographic or keyword targeting you'd expect. Local targeting is already prevalent in search engine marketing and it's good to know that display ads are heading in the same direction.

The other noticeable trend to get excited about is the movement toward ad pricing based on cost-per-action rather than cost-per-click. Paying for ads based on CPA means that you don't pay the publisher until you get the action you want from the ad. For example, if you want your online display ad to drive someone to an online store to buy the advertised product, you won't have to pay until someone actually clicks the ad and completes the purchase. Several companies--such as Hydra--have announced an emphasis on CPA tracking and billing.

• How to get ready
  Get to know your acquisition costs on an intimate level. If cost-per-action advertising sounds attractive, you'll need to have a firm understanding of what you're willing to pay for each new customer or action your advertising obtains in order to know how to bid. If you're interested in the possibilities of targeted display advertising (and you're interested in getting sophisticated with your targeting) start building a profile of your best prospects and customers--including geography, demographic information and typical buying behavior. If you need help figuring out how to analyze your customers to get that information, online advertising company Ad Buyer offers a set of free audience profiling tools.

Innovation No. 2: Online Retail Promotions
Selling physical goods has long been about driving traffic to your e-commerce store so prospective customers can see and buy your products. That trend seems destined for a giant turn in the opposite direction, because it won't be long before smaller retailers have the ability to sell more of their products on other highly targeted consumer websites. One such website is Milo.com, where the CEO announced the company's intention to enable anyone to search real-time availability and local product information on every product, on every shelf, in every local business in America.
Another outstanding innovation for online retail comes from Pixazza. Pixazza is changing the way consumers shop by allowing people to browse and buy products that appear in any photos. For example, let's say you're reading an article in an online entertainment magazine and you see a photo of Jennifer Lopez wearing earrings that are to-die-for. Getting yourself a similar pair is easier than ever; as you hover over the photo Pixazza recommends earrings at suggested prices far below what Jennifer Lopez probably paid for hers.

• How to get ready
  It's time to get your inventory database in shape. Selling products on websites owned by other companies will likely require you to conform to their database and information technology standards. There's no need to get overly sophisticated here. If your company has the ability to publish real time inventory and product information to your own website, you probably already have enough technology to quickly enable a feed of that information to other online databases.

Innovation No. 3: Social Media Advertising
Social media is arguably the most innovative internet tool to emerge since, well, the internet. There are definitely good reasons to advertise on social media sites (this includes your own fan pages and networks). The challenge for a small business is the same challenge facing any business: How do you get enough people to pay attention to your ads while they are busy uploading photos or conversing with friends?
There are a number of companies working to make social media advertising more engaging and even fun, and it won't be long before there are a plethora of choices for small budgets. At the show, NTB Media announced an interesting video advertising product with built-in games and quizzes to get people to pay attention and remember the content in the videos, and Fan Appz announced access to an integrated suite of social media applications designed to attract attention and engagement in exchange for a subscription of just $50 per month.

• How to get ready
  Test before you invest. Social media advertising is already accessible and affordable to small business, but affordability isn't the only reason to invest in a particular form of advertising. Don't invest in a new social media tool or advertising strategy until you are sure you have the ability and the time to track your results and compare them against other opportunities. As a small business, you can't afford to invest in everything. If you don't track and compare your results, you won't have the information you need to make budget-wise choices.  

Innovation No. 4: Mobile MarketingAdvertising and messaging to mobile phones is definitely a hot topic among marketers. In the past, most mobile marketing tools focused on only one aspect of mobile marketing, such as text-messaging, application development or mobile websites. Those tools are now converging as integrated solutions. One such company, 2ergo, recently announced plans to offer a comprehensive suite of marketing solutions that include SMS, MMS, e-mail and mobile websites. Be on the lookout for companies offering comprehensive mobile solutions priced for small businesses in the not-too-distant future.

• How to get ready
  Make sure at least a portion of your website is designed to display and function properly on mobile devices--especially the pages that contain contact information for your business. If you have a location-based business, start making your communications more mobile friendly so people can respond to your offers and information while they are on-the-go. Sending text-messages and e-mails with mobile coupons and snack-sized bites of product information are great places to start. Also, social media users are more likely to become mobile savvy than the average internet user, so make sure you have a presence on the most common social sites.

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John Arnold's no-nonsense marketing advice is featured in his well-known marketing books which include Web Marketing All-In-One Desk Reference for Dummies, E-Mail Marketing for Dummies and the forthcoming book Mobile Marketing for Dummies. John is also a leading marketing speaker, trainer and consultant specializing in DIY marketing advice for small businesses, franchises and associations. If you have a marketing tool or technology you'd like John to write about, contact him at http://JohnArnold.com.
http://www.entrepreneur.com/marketing/onlinemarketing/article206418.html

Synthetic CDOs: Where's The Love?

Bob McTeer is a fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis. He was also President of the Dallas Fed for 14 years. 

It’s hard for me to enjoy a good fight if I don’t have a dog in it, so to speak.
I spent much of last Tuesday watching the TV in a Washington hotel room trying to decide whether I had a dog in the Goldman Sachs attack. Which side would naturally be my side--my home team? Who were the Cowboys?
Finding my side was more difficult than I expected. As I settled in, Goldman started off as the slight favorite if, for no other reason, than the other side featured bullying senators sitting on their thrones casting stones at their modern-day Christians. (Forgive me. I know it's not the best fit.)
But, somehow, I found it difficult to fit synthetic CDOs into my good-guy basket. I taught money and banking in night school many years back when it was a simpler subject:
"Financial intermediaries serve the purpose of channeling our saving into the most productive investments, thus contributing to maximum economic growth. They are an essential part of the market pricing and allocation mechanism."
The home team tried to say something like that with their references to market making and by pointing out that they gave market participants the opportunity to select their desired level of risk. Their desired level of risk?
Who desires risk? I guess they meant the desired level of return which is positively correlated with risk. But why didn't they say it that way? I couldn't think of the rhetorical pothole they were trying to avoid. Then I remembered that Goldman people are smarter than the rest of us, so I shouldn’t worry my pretty little head about it.
As a person who "believes in the market," I knew that if the market rewarded Goldman as handsomely as it apparently does for creating things like synthetic CDOs there must be a great demand for that service. You don’t make gobs of money selling what no one wants to buy. They are so valuable, they must have some value. Right? Well, they do give people the opportunity to buy risk.
Somehow, my mind wandered back to my class in the history of economic thought--in the sections before Adam Smith--in the dark ages. Before Adam Smith were the Mercantilists, who wanted to export everything, import nothing, and accumulate the difference in gold. Gold was the measure of the wealth of nations. King gold! The king is dead. Long live the king.
Along with the Mercantilists were the Physiocrats, who likened an economy to the blood circulatory system and, more to the point here, believed that the only true measure of the wealth of nations (still lower case) was agricultural output. The farmers created all the wealth, and all others were parasites. We didn’t spend much time on the Physiocrats.
Extending beyond agriculture wasn’t hard. Nonagricultural goods are also good. Manufacturing is good. Services are good also. Remember time and place utility? That’s what makes a $75 meal in a restaurant a better deal than the $5 supper at home.
Once you get comfortable with services in concept, financial services aren't too much of a stretch. After all, we've got to channel those savings into investment. How many people does it take to do that, I wonder? What percentage of GDP should finance be, do you think?
I don’t know much, but I do know that last question was a loaded question that nobody who "believes in the market" would touch with a 10 foot pole. The markets themselves answer such questions and we would reveal our lack of faith in the markets if we even speculated on such "should be" questions. We just don't do normative.
Well, I didn't think so, but, recently, I had a very unusual experience that I still haven't figured out. I attended a forum for economic bloggers and all the participants appeared to be true believers. At a break-out session, someone asked how big the finance sector should be, implying that ours may have grown too big somehow. I waited for the axe to fall, or, at least, for someone to go get soap to wash out the offending mouth. But neither happened. Instead, a discussion ensued that was premised on the possibility that the market had let it get too big. I couldn't believe it.
That discussion preceded the televised discussion of synthetic CDOs last Tuesday. You start to rationalize the great social value in CDOs, but then the "synthetic" part demands your attention. Billion dollar bets on nothing?
This line of thinking caused me to reflect on whether I should become a Physiocrat after all. I can see the value in ham, eggs and pork bellies, all properly hedged of course.
But just as I was about to head down that road, the Chairman of the Senate Committee had the Chief Executive Officer of Goldman bent over the ropes. The Chairman was coming in for the kill while the CEO struggled to recover from the damage of his rope-a-dope defense. Wasn’t it true that Goldman had a huge short position, essentially betting against the housing market and America? Well, the large short position was matched--pretty much--by a large long position. The "net" position wasn’t so large.
That made some sense to me, but the Chairman said he didn't want to talk about net positions, or long positions. He just wanted to talk about the gross short position. But the shorts were there because of the longs. Or was it the longs were there because of the shorts? Probably both. Anyway, what matters is that risk management requires being on both sides of the trade.
By the way, let's talk about market makers and market making. No, let's not talk about that. Let's just talk about your big short against America.
I'm not real sure who's on the side of the angels in this particular debate, but I am sure which side thinks I'm stupid, along with the rest of you out in television land. Well, stupid is as stupid does. And that’s all I have to say about that.

http://blogs.forbes.com/streettalk/2010/05/02/synthetic-cdos-wheres-the-love/

Four Best Ways To Invest In Bonds

For the casual observer, bond investing would appear to be as simple as buying the bond with the highest yield. While this works well when shopping for a certificate of deposit (CD) at the local bank, it's not that simple in the real world. There are multiple options available when it comes to structuring a bond portfolio, and each strategy comes with its own tradeoffs. The four principal strategies used to manage bond portfolios are:
--Passive, or "buy and hold"
--Index matching, or "quasi passive"
--Immunization, or "quasi active"
--Dedicated and active
Passive Bond Strategy
The passive buy-and-hold investor is typically looking to maximize the income generating properties of bonds. The premise of this strategy is that bonds are assumed to be safe, predictable sources of income. Buy and hold involves purchasing individual bonds and holding them to maturity. Cash flow from the bonds can be used to fund external income needs or can be reinvested in the portfolio into other bonds or other asset classes. In a passive strategy, there are no assumptions made as to the direction of future interest rates and any changes in the current value of the bond due to shifts in the yield are not important.

The bond may be originally purchased at a premium or a discount, while assuming that full par will be received upon maturity. The only variation in total return from the actual coupon yield is the reinvestment of the coupons as they occur. On the surface, this may appear to be a lazy style of investing, but in reality passive bond portfolios provide stable anchors in rough financial storms. They minimize or eliminate transaction costs, and if originally implemented during a period of relatively high interest rates, they have a decent chance of outperforming active strategies.

One of the main reasons for their stability is the fact that passive strategies work best with very high-quality, non-callable bonds like government or investment grade corporate or municipal bonds. These types of bonds are well suited for a buy-and hold strategy as they minimize the risk associated with changes in the income stream due to embedded options, which are written into the bond's covenants at issue and stay with the bond for life. Like the stated coupon, call and put features embedded in a bond allow the issue to act on those options under specified market conditions.
Ladders are one of the most common forms of passive bond investing. This is where the portfolio is divided into equal parts and invested in laddered style maturities over the investor's time horizon. Dividing the principal into equal parts provides a steady equal stream of cash flow annually.
Indexing Bond Strategy
Indexing is considered to be quasi-passive by design. The main objective of indexing a bond portfolio is to provide a return and risk characteristic closely tied to the targeted index. While this strategy carries some of the same characteristics of the passive buy-and-hold, it has some flexibility. Just like tracking a specific stock market index, a bond portfolio can be structured to mimic any published bond index. One common index mimicked by portfolio managers is the Lehman Aggregate Bond Index.
Due to the size of this index, the strategy would work well with a large portfolio due to the number of bonds required to replicate the index. One also needs to consider the transaction costs associated with not only the original investment, but also the periodic rebalancing of the portfolio to reflect changes in the index.

Immunization Bond Strategy
This strategy has the characteristics of both active and passive strategies. By definition, pure immunization implies that a portfolio is invested for a defined return for a specific period of time regardless of any outside influences, such as changes in interest rates. Similar to indexing, the opportunity cost of using the immunization strategy is potentially giving up the upside potential of an active strategy for the assurance that the portfolio will achieve the intended desired return.
As in the buy-and-hold strategy, by design the instruments best suited for this strategy are high-grade bonds with remote possibilities of default. In fact, the purest form of immunization would be to invest in a zero-coupon bond and match the maturity of the bond to the date on which the cash flow is expected to be needed. This eliminates any variability of return, positive or negative, associated with the reinvestment of cash flows.

Duration, or the average life of a bond, is commonly used in immunization. It is a much more accurate predictive measure of a bond's volatility than maturity. This strategy is commonly used in the institutional investment environment by insurance companies, pension funds and banks to match the time horizon of their future liabilities with structured cash flows. It is one of the soundest strategies and can be used successfully by individuals. For example, just like a pension fund would use an immunization to plan for cash flows upon an individual's retirement, that same individual could build a dedicated portfolio for his or her own retirement plan.
Active Bond Strategy
The goal of active management is maximizing total return. Along with the enhanced opportunity for returns obviously comes increased risk. Some examples of active styles include interest rate anticipation, timing, valuation and spread exploitation, and multiple interest rate scenarios. The basic premise of all active strategies is that the investor is willing to make bets on the future rather than settle with what a passive strategy can offer.
Conclusion
There are many strategies for investing in bonds that investors can employ. The buy-and-hold approach appeals to investors who are looking for income and are not willing to make predictions. The middle-of-the-road strategies include indexation and immunization, both of which offer some security and predictability. Then there is the active world, which is not for the casual investor. Each strategy has its place and when implemented correctly, can achieve the goals for which it was intended.

http://www.forbes.com/2010/04/30/invest-bond-portfolio-personal-finance-bond-portfolio_2.html