eCommerce Know-How

eCommerce Know-How Know-Letter Newsletters

Voice of the Retailer

April 20, 2010

Bowlingshirt.com


eCommerce Know-How spoke with Josh Shanas, Director of E-Commerce & Marketing at Bowlingshirt.com

Bowlingshirt.com

Q. What aspects of your eCommerce business were the most challenging for you in the past 12 months?

A. We've gone thru a replatforming. Our old platform lacked features that are now "standard" - like good site search, navigation, and search-friendly URLs, Also, we sell a lot of products and the previous architecture didn't support that. Every time we added a new product, we had to ask: is this something people will see or is it something we pray that they see?

 

Q. What eCommerce trends are most intriguing to you right now?

A. We are more interested in having great basic functionality. For example, now we can have one product listing and relate that to any category. Now, I can schedule price changes in advance, and do rules-based promotions rather than be restricted to discount codes. A lot of the new, great tools that we get with our new platform will sit there for a while, while we figure it all out and find the resources to administer them.

 

Q. Any tips or tricks about defining requirements?

A. No amount of preparation is ever going to be enough. And you have to be very black-and-white in terms of what you really need versus what you want.

 

Q. Any lessons learned the hard way?

A. If you don't define it up front, you're probably not going to get it, or not get it in the way that you're expecting, or you'll get it later and pay more.

 

Q. What do you get the biggest kick out of in your job?

A. One of the coolest things is getting emails or Facebook posts from people all around the globe, letting us know that we did something to make their lives happier. It means a lot when they really love what they get from us and spend the time to tell us.

 

Q. What is your one "must have" item (home, work, travel)?

A. The internet.


Bottom Line: Sometimes you have to stop the 'band-aiding', bite the bullet
and upgrade platforms. Then you can grow into your platform
instead of being limited by it.



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