October 10 2008

IR2008 session report — Lessons from retailers with second mover advantage

Stream two at Internet Retailing 2008 looked at "Fast track to success: second mover advantage on the web" and focused in on the approach taken by retailers who have launched transactional websites only recently and how they have taken advantage of their second mover position to succeed. Stream chairman Dr Mike Baxter from Moneyspyder reports on the top tips speakers passed on to delegates and the key lessons learned

Key messages from the 'Fast track to success: second mover advantage on the web' session at Internet Retailing 2008 were:

• Being second into a market is an established idea — Apple is the obvious example, it's never first to market but it's still a winner in the markets it enters. For retailers looking to relaunch their website or about to launch their first transactional website now, there is a huge body of knowledge that they can draw on to take a fast track to success.
• Companies with a strong brand and strong customer base can be successful second movers. For larger organisations, who don't have the nimbleness of a smaller business, making second mover advantage a strategy can turn that lack of agility into a business advantage.
• Ecommerce is fundamentally pretty difficult to do well and, the larger the retailer, the larger the challenge. The challenges exist not only on the technical front but in terms of the complexity of fraud management, of delivery services and of ensuring the call centre is equipped to both take orders and handle complaints and queries. Michael Ross from eCommera explained that, simply, there are an awful lot of things to do (his company has a model it uses to slice the problem into pieces.)
• Peter Callaway of House of Fraser and George Nolan of TUI Travel had a shared message. Both had watched and waited before launching into the market — and both could see major advantages from being able to learn from others' mistakes.
• Getting the right staff is still an issue. No established, standard ecommerce team structure yet exists so each retailer comes up with its own. And that leads to different, multi-skilled job descriptions that are hard to fill.
• Wendy Derbyshire from Scotts of Stow told delegates how the company had been running nine sites on four different platforms and faced a huge range of legacy issues and a major challenge to consolidate everything into one technical base that could underpin the whole business. Scotts decided to bite the bullet and embark on a major project to put in place one infrastructure for the whole business — but took an unusual approach. They decided to share the burden (and the development costs) of this major project with another non-competing company facing a similar problem and where the two team leads had previously worked together successfully.

Internet Retailing 2008 took place at the Novotel in Hammersmith, west London, on Tuesday 7 October. Delegates will be able to access all the presentations online from 20 October. For those who weren't able to attend on the day, the proceedings are also available to purchase from the show office.

by Sarah Clark (Web Editor)