euroblaze | OXID e-Commerce User Blog

As a part of our regular breakfast meetings, which we use as study-hours for understanding the latest trends in e-Commerce, Martin Näwig and I cross-sected the business-model of Shopping-Clubs. Our aim was to understand the relevance of Shopping-Clubs to the e-Commerce industry in the current phase of market-evolution, and if they could make an impact on our own SME customers’ online-sales strategies.  We examined some of the leading Shopping-Clubs, such GILT, Venté Privee, Brands4Friends and Zalando Lounge, their offers, their deal-newsletters, customer-bases and where possible profitability.  The conclusion of our study was to derive a set of criteria the Shopping Club business-model could be leveraged to:

• Setup lucrative recurring revenue-channels
• Connect with customers
• Build customer loyality

.. for SME e-Commerce merchants.

The Encumbent Business Model

The drivers of the Shopping Clubs business-model are following:

1. Product offers are visible only to registered users.  Buyers can register for free, but there is a short  ”selection” process, through which the potential-buyer is accepted into the Club
2. Primarily, branded products are offered
3. Enormous discounts-reductions are shown compared to advertised street-price
4. Offers are time-limited, which means the discounts expire within a few days
5. Primarily clearence/SALE/end-of-season products are offered

In effect, the promise to the potential-buyer is that by being a part of the (percieved) exclusive shopping-club, heavy discounts on branded products  over street-price are possible.

Deal Marketing

Offers in Shopping Clubs are marketed primarily by email-newsletter.  At least one mailing is sent out daily in order to announce one or more time-limited offers. To accompany the newsletters, elegant looking websites display highlighted sortiments of high-value branded products.

Value-Perception

The customer is enticed by the perception of exclusivity, lure of high-street brands, percieved savings due to heavy-discounting and the urgency of decision, lest the deal should expire.

The Problem

We feel the business model is solid, since it’s built on time-tested marketing principles of customer behavior.  However we were suspicious of why the business-model is being driven by a few Top-10 players, and has not become a mass phenomena which every e-commerce merchant could offer next to his regular webshop. In effect, can the same customer-value not be offered by smaller individual merchants as well?  We believe, yes, the same value-proposition can be offered by any e-Commerce merchant.  However, the consumer has got cleverer over the last years, and doesn’t buy the lure of exclusivity, and takes for granted that if there is a massive reduction on this particular site, the real value of the product is infact the advertised reduced value, and it should be possible to obtain that price elsewhere as well. In addition, buyers are flooded with online-offers of just about everything, via newsletters, web-page ads (alá Adwords, banners etc) and even TV-spots for webshops.  So a daily deal-newsletter doesn’t hold any special lure for buyers – it just gets mixed into all the other offers buyers are bombarded with. Most of all, what sticks out the most in the sites we have analyized is the lack of focus in the product selection, and in targeting a specific requirement buyers might have at any point in time.  Without a connection to a know requirement of the consumer, (s)he is not moved to make a purchase. In addition, we missed one of the most essential drivers for e-Commerce today in the Shopping Clubs we analyzed – Social Media.  Consumers want to talk and listen about products before they buy them.  So the large Shopping Clubs could do well by integrating stronger and enabling conversations about their products on social-sites.

Success Formula for the Mass of e-Commerce Merchants

Focus is Essential

In order to get an audience for the Shopping Club business model, and build a profitable membership-base, it is essential for SME merchants to focus intensly on

1. the product offering
2. the target audience

A Shopping Club with general high-street branded collection of clothing and fashion accessories is not going to cut it!  What would be needed, to remain with this example-segment of fashion, is a Jeans Club or a Shoe Club.  The turn on for members of such a highly focused Shopping Club is that it offers for a single resort to a wide collection products, example a wide collection of jeans.  Customer value such a site and the merchant behind it as resort for expertise.  Combine with that Social Media tools, such as a comment-stream and customers get the value of recommendation from other buyers that have experienced the product-collection.  Social Media tools also give such a Shopping Club the advantage of the merchant participating actively in conversations about his products.  This in turn creates connection-points between merchants and potential-buyers.

Evergreen Products

Certain types of products are always needed by consumers.  Jeans is a good example – most of us buy at least 1 pair every year, and always have a few in the wordrobe in few different colors and fit.  Let’s just call such products Evergreen. Some other good examples of evergreen products are coffee-beans, wines, snack-food, flowers or office-supplies.

Merchants dealing with evergreen products can particularly effectively combine their wares with a Shopping Club experience, “socialize” it, and consequently build a loyal base of customers over time.

Margins for Discounting

It is also important for the merchant to ensure that he offers discounts only to the extent that his margins are not destroyed.  With a focused group of buyers and a social-connection to them, the discount-pressure needn’t be exagerated, as is done by large Shopping Club brands like Gilt, Vente-Privee et-al.  Buyers will still appreciate smaller, genuine discounts as the merchant maintains a transparent customer relationship as well as price-policy.

Extra Value Points

Focused Shopping Clubs, example a Wine Club, could combine their product offer with other value-adds for their focused target group, such as vineyard tours, wine-tastings or gourmet cooking classes on weekends.  This attracts members of the Shopping Club to connect tighter with the “community” and extract more value from their participation.  The wine-club Lot18 does a particularly good job at offering such extra-value.

Software and Tools for Shopping Clubs

euroblaze provides e-Commerce solutions to online merchants to design and launch Shopping Club campaigns.  Our core e-Commerce shop-software, the OXID e-Shop system offers all the features necessary for merchants to launch and manage successful Shopping Club projects.

Contact euroblaze today for our Shopping Club advise and services!

In OXID there is no way to enter the sorting-index for products inside category using the /admin interface, although sufficient provision is made for such an index in the database.  Using the below described method you can modify your /admin interfaces in such a fashion as to manually maintain product-sorting sequences in each category.

Step-01: Add a function to save sorting-index

Add below function to SHOPROOT/admin/inc/category_main.inc.php within the class

public function saveCategorySort ()
{
   $oDb = oxDb::getDb();
   $sPosId = oxConfig::getParameter( "sort_oxid");
   $sPosValue = oxConfig::getParameter( "sort_value");
   if ( isset( $sPosId) && ("" != $sPosId ) ) {
      $sO2CViewName = $this->_getViewName( "oxobject2category" );
      $sSelect = "select * from $sO2CViewName where
      $sO2CViewName.oxid= " . $oDb->quote( $sPosId );
      $oO2C = oxNew( "oxi18n" );
      $oO2C->init( "oxobject2category");
      if ( $oO2C->assignRecord( $sSelect ) ) {
           $oO2C->oxobject2category__oxpos->setValue( $sPosValue );
           $oO2C->save();
      }
   }
}

Step-02

Next add below array to container2 so that array( ‘oxpos’, ‘oxobject2category’, 1, 1, 0 ), at third (0-3rd) position and array( ‘oxid’, ‘oxobject2category’, 0, 0, 1 ), at eight (0-8th) position. The array positioning should be correct in the file.

Step-03: Replace the Popup Template-file

Then replace the complete tpl file with  out/admin/tpl/popups/category_main.tpl (please unzip before moving into OXID code-tree).

The container will edit and save it according to the position numbers which are edited in out/admin/tpl/popups/category_main.tpl

$('sort_value').value    = oParam._oData._3;
$('sort_oxid').value     = oParam._oData._8;

Step-04: Update Language File

Append the the language files in: SHOPROOT/out/admin/de/ (as well as for other shop-languages)

CATEGORY_MAIN_SELECTONEATTR = “<label for sorting-index file>”

Step-05

Then proceed to start assigning values to products in categories, following Product Management > Categories > Assign Products.

Compatibility

The above mini-howto was written on OXID CE 4.5.3_38045 and tested separately on CE 4.5.0.

User @Alain reports a problem on v. 4.4.7.   Any further feedback from other versions will help us possibly make the howto compatible with your version.  Alternatively you may commit code as well:)

Big-G is going social and for me this marks a big moment in the history of the Internet, on par with Facebook’s launch of social-media as we know it today. It sounds very negative, to say that Google has turned it’s big guns on facebook with the launch of G+, but heck I get a kick out of saying anything good about Google, because they care about the progress of the Internet in the right direction and we have benefited largely from Google’s services (aside Search, we use Apps, Gmail and Analytics).

Inspite of it’s 700 million users, Facebook should be fretting about G+, and afraid right now of being displaced as the top-social-network on the planet. Infact, the most urgent and the fastest ever corporate-reincarnation should happen soon at facebook, for following reasons:

1. The tiny 8 point fonts on fb user interfaces suck. This might have worked for a Harvard-dorm invention phase, but 700 million people are getting ever bigger screens and want to read easier. Change this soon or they’ll be stuck with it for a long time.
   _
2. The attitude to privacy at fb’s top management needs to radically tame down. Fb might think they want to radically open up the Internet, but it’s users are not that far on the vision. We users still want, ultimate if possible, control over our information. Social media should be a media for voluntary-sharing, not forced. And users will gravitate to platforms that respect our fundamental instincts for privacy (read G+)
   _
3. Google is combining Search with Social, and everyone knows Google has a 70-95% (depending on the geography) market-share for search. What this really means is website-owners who want to be found over Google (and believe me this is just about eveyone) have a strategic alignment with G+. They will _join G+ very fast. And by _join, I mean they will bring their _content and _users to G+. And when that happens, we can all say “game over”. You see Facebook doesn’t offer this incentive to website owners.

Now with Facebook 2.0, they have to neutralize this defecit, which they could probably do ONLY by combining their social-data with search, as in Bing and Yahoo! Infact the upside of is could be an interesting synergy of the type 1+1=3.

And we are not even factoring in Mobile here yet. If anyone wants to continue this article on how Search, Social and Mobile will overlap to shape the way we consume online-services, feel free to continue below.

In previous versions of OXID it was possible to deactivate the Guestbook from the /admin.  In the backend an oxconfig table variable was set.

Since OXID 4.5.x, most likely due to widgetization efforts in the product, deactivation of the Guestbook is not possible from /admin.  It has to be accomplished on the template by commenting out the effecting lines. For example, the calling-link in the footer can be commented out in /out/template_name/tpl/widget/footer/services.tpl

The below should work

<!-- a href="[{ oxgetseourl ident=$oViewConf->getSelfLink()|cat:"cl=guestbook" }]">[{ oxmultilang ident="WIDGET_SERVICES_GUESTBOOK" }]</a><br/-->

OXID merchants can contact us for such template modifications!

To prepare for that day of  disaster when your server crashes and your web-shop gets erased from the face of the Internet, we are happy to be giving away a free script for taking database dumps in an automated fashion (using cron) of your OXID e-Shop databases.

The script is written in Python, and has been tested to run on any LINUX machine supporting the language.

The code can be downloaded from code.google.com.

USAGE

shell$: eb_takedbdump.py -e <env> -s <shoproot>

Where

<env> = Any environment label to signify the environment where the shop is running.  Typically you’d set prod, dev, staging, vm and such values.  This value is then appended to the filename of the dump that is produced.

<shoproot> = the root folder where the core/ shop files reside (along with config.inc.php, .htaccess etc)

Working

Once the script runs successfully, you can expect 2 things:

1. A database dump file with the name dbname_env.sql (See Usage above for <env>).  dbname is the shop’s database name from config.inc.php
2. A log file called eb_takedbdump.log in <shoproot>/log/

You will have to make sure to set the permissions on database/ and log/ directories appropriately in case the script is being as a different user than the one owning the shop-directories.

REQUEST to Users

If you use the script, we would be thankful if you can mention (by email or comment below) in which server-environment and hoster you are successfully (or unsuccessfully) running this script.

We’ve got it to run on below environments until now:

1. Linux server000-han 2.6.99.8intel #1 SMP Sun Oct 30 22:38:04 CET 2011 x86_64 GNU/Linux (Profihost hosting account)
2. Linux xxx 2.6.26-2-amd64 #1 SMP Mon Jun 13 16:29:33 UTC 2011 x86_64 GNU/Linux (dedicated Debian 5.0.9 Server)
3. OXID Virtual Machine 2.0

Next Steps

As todos for the next version we are collecting the following list:

1. Support mentioning log-level as a CLI input parameter
2. Support a CLI parameter for rsync-ing the dump-file with an rsync-server
3. zip or gz the dump so that it’s more transportable (ex. to a back-up server by rsync et al)