Background Noise

Quick Commerce

Over the course of my current career with ATG, I've had the privilege of talking to a lot of companies -big and small - about their eCommerce strategy. One of  the things that continues to amaze me is the number of companies that over-think the execution of their online presence. The concept of eCommerce seems so enourmous to some, and as a result they never leave the starting blocks.

When you distill eCommerce down to it's most basic form, it's pretty simple: You are asking people to pay you for goods or services. Yes, it's important that they find your web site, and whatever your selling needs to be easy to find. But in the end, the weeks and months that you can spend trying to wrap your head around SEO, usability analysis and Google Analytics is a poor excuse for not getting started. Call it "throwing the baby out with the bathwater", or whatever lame analogy you want to use, but it all comes down to lost revenue opportunities.

I was reminded of this recently, when my friends at FormSpring announced their new integrated payment features. For the uneducated, FormSpring simplifies the tedious and often time-consuming process of building online forms. It seems that many of their customers were using their forms as a gateway to an eCommerce transaction with PayPal or Google Checkout. Unfortunately, those services force the user away from the site where the forms are hosted, so FormSpring decided to integrate several different payments types into their product in order to streamline the transaction process.

FormSpring is one of those little gems that can help companies impliment what I call "Quick Commerce", and it's impossible to overthink! You can go from concept to execution in a matter of hours, and begin accepting real transactions immediately. This is not only a great tool for the budding retailer or entrepreneur where time-to-market is critical, but also for larger corporations that need to get a proof-of-concept out the door with limited resources.

Using the right tool for the right job is essential, and marketers shouldn't overlook tools like FormSpring when it comes time to stop thinking about something, and start transacting.

You're Doing It Wrong: The Corporate RFP

As I write this, I'm taking a break from working on a response to a "Request for Proposal", commonly referred to as an RFP or sometimes an RFI. 150 pages of light reading, with probing questions like:

"What quality control processes have you implemented in order to mitigate the frequency and severity of errors in future releases of your software?"

Look, I've been on the other side of the table and I totally get it. This is going to be a very big project for the company in question, with a lot of internal stakeholders, and is not a decision to be made lightly. Making the wrong decision here would seriously compromise their ability to grow their business online. The first reaction when faced with an undertaking like this, is the get out the old fine-tooth comb and start combing.

Unfortunately, most of our prospective customers anchor this process with the corporate albatross of decision making: the RFP. Which is fine...if it was 1982.

The RFP was a necessary evil back in the dark ages, when corporations would only open the kimono when forced to do so through a bidding process. In fact, most RFP's were done as away to force vendors to blindly bid against each other as a way to get the best price. Somehow, the RFP has evolved into a magic document that too many companies think will actually help them make these business critical decisions.

Let's get real about this process for a minute:

- On the corporate side, hundreds of man-hours are spent preparing the RFP.

- Vendors are almost always just going through a copy-and-paste exercise when responding. And they will never - I repeat - never give out their best pricing in an RFP.

- The result is hundreds of pages of information that has to be processed by multiple people in order to be remotely useful.

I've seen this process in action as an eCommerce executive, and many times over in my current role. Not once have I ever seen anyone make an educated decision to select a vendor based on how they responded to an RFP. Even when RFP's are involved, the decisions are ultimately made by smart people who take the time to talk to each of vendors in detail, research the company and it's products, and more than often they rely on their most valuable asset: their gut.

I wish I had the reach to convince every corporate IT and Project Management office to just stop perpetuating this dinosaur of a process, but obviously I don't. The irony of it all, is that almost every company that drags us through this forced march is telling us that they have two major objectives in mind: increasing their time-to-market and return-on-investment. In both cases, they're starting out behind in the count.