Creating a new Retail Concept for ecommerce

A retail concept is a new Website that sells your merchandise in a different way. A/B testing is a proven technique to tune features on your existing ecommerce site, but it is comes up short of a new digital property with its own capabilities and branding. Selling your merchandise in entirely new ways with new branding is not a new idea for retailers, but is becoming easier to do on-line. Your existing merchandising process should stay largely the same. The fundamental idea is to leverage your existing merchandising capabilities and push your products over multiple retail concept sites, each tuned for a different customer demographic. For example as you can see in the screenshots below, Arizona Jeans (azjeans.com) is a retail concept site distinct from its parent company JCPenny (jcpenney.com) and Urban Outfitters’ (urbanoutfitters.com) site is targeted to a very different demographic than its Anthropology (anthropologie.com) brand. Both JCPenny and Urban Outfitters are using their core abilities to merchandise products in their sites, but are selling their products in very different ways using these distinct digital properties.

Increasingly lightweight user interface technologies such as scripting languages are making it easier to rapidly create rich customer experiences. When these lightweight user interfaces tiers sit on top of a reusable SOA-based architecture, the UI represents a whole new retail concept. This is really all that is required to put a new concept on-line. There may be a trickle-down effect on back office operations if the retail concept is attempting be a truly new brand. Considerations such as call center changes for the new brand as well as packaging and labeling changes must be managed. A new brand can also act as a new legal entity if the terms with vendors or customers change based on the new brand. For its part however, creating a new digital property on-line is becoming easier.

An assembly-based SOA architecture and a lightweight UI language are the two critical parts to allow you to rapidly create a new retail concept. The separation between the UI tier and the services tier is the most important part. A new retail concept lies primarily in the user interface. The technical engineers who develop UIs are a combination of creative designer, information architect and site builder. These engineers require fluidity with their development tools. A hardened, transactional and statefull infrastructure is not what they desire. They prefer an architecture that is simple and agile. They need tools to help them change their designs quickly, as the UI is much more susceptible to the whims and scrutiny of the business users than are the back-end services and data. Every pixel of the UI engineer’s work is seen and the vast majority of an ecommerce site’s brand is locked in the user interface, not the functionality. A new retail concept is 80% new user interface and 20% new back-end functionality. The user interface engineers need a platform that is able to be altered quickly, without a lot of architectural hindrances. The enterprise frameworks such as Java and .NET are overly heavy for this. The lightweight scripting languages such as PHP, Python, Perl and Ruby are great for this type of rapid user interface development. These frameworks have a bit of architecture with Model-View-Controller frameworks and some basic logging, security and load balancing capabilities, but that is about all that is required. And when combined with great AJAX libraries such as Prototype.js, Script.aculo.us, Modalbox, Validation, Prototips and Prototabs, they make a powerful user interface toolset that is extremely lightweight, and this toolset makes creating entirely new digital properties easier than ever.

The back-end engineers still prefer larger frameworks such as those offered by Java and .NET. In these enterprise frameworks capabilities such as failover, load balancing, transactional integrity, security, object-relational mapping and fine-grained operational controls are available. These are perfect to confidently create reusable enterprise SOA and services that have all the technical patterns that back-end engineers like to have at their disposal.

If you would like a more in-depth description of an assembly architecture, feel free to checkout this whitepaper that delves deeper into this specific subject.