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Sears Clones Best Buy Movie Site, Both E-Tailers Lose
Cutting those corners probably made it very inexpensive for Sonic to launch Sears’ movie download business. That’s cost savings on the IT side, but it’s very expensive from an overall E-Commerce perspective. If there’s literally no difference between E-Commerce sites from Sears and Best Buy, how can Sears compete? For Best Buy, there’s an even bigger issue: What happened to the E-Commerce differentiation it thought it had? Apparently those questions didn’t occur to either Best Buy or Sears when they cut the deals that resulted in twin, competing E-Commerce sites.
All outsourcing involves losing some control. That means CIOs have to be especially careful when IT work lands in another vendor’s hands. If you don’t look out for your business, it’s not likely that an outside vendor will—especially if that outside vendor is also doing deals with your competitors.
It’s not just the issue of two competitors whose E-Commerce sites look the same. If Sears didn’t spot that problem long before the Alphaline site went live, what else slipped through the cracks? Handing off the operation of an E-tail site to a third party is one thing. Giving complete control of customer information to a third party who is providing the same services to a competitor can make things very murky indeed.
Could customer reviews generated on one E-tailer’s site percolate to the “twin” sites of competitors? What about competitive data on what products sell best, or actual CRM data on specific groups of customers?
If you think that can’t happen, consider this: In 2008, a group of 109 McDonald’s restaurants in the Salt Lake City area decided to do a mobile commerce test. The work was handed off to a third party, mobile-coupon vendor Cellfire. But it didn’t occur to anyone at McDonald’s that nothing prevented Cellfire from pooling E-Commerce data with that from other Cellfire customers.
Yes, outsourcing is always high on the list of ways to cut E-Commerce costs. Just make sure it’s doesn’t end up costing you control of the business.
Cards issued by European banks when used online cross border don't usually support AVS checks. So, when a European card is used with a billing address that's in the US, an ecom merchant wouldn't necessarily know that the shipping zip code doesn't match the billing code.
-Marc
