David Feinleib
Bricks to Clicks
Why Some Brands Will Thrive in E-Commerce and Others Won’t
David Feinleib
San Francisco, California, USA
Any source code or other supplementary material referenced by the author in this book is available to readers on GitHub via the book’s product page, located at www.apress.com/9781484228043 . For more detailed information, please visit www.apress.com/source-code .
ISBN 978-1-4842-2804-3
e-ISBN 978-1-4842-2805-0
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4842-2805-0
© David Feinleib 2017
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The Apress Business Team
About the Technical Reviewer
With more than 20 years of retail experience, Mark Stamps began his career leading merchandising systems development for Walmart and Sam’s Club. He then moved to Procter & Gamble, leading sales teams across multiple retailers, channels, and product categories. Mark gained much of his e-commerce experience when he became the leader of P&G’s Walmart.com global e-commerce team. Mark is now the Walmart team leader of Philips Personal Health of North America.
Introduction
As the founder and CEO of Content Analytics, the “Control Center for eCommerce,” I’ve been privileged to work firsthand with the world’s largest brands and retailers as they navigate the shift from bricks to clicks. Our clients span a diverse set of verticals, from P&G, Clorox, and PepsiCo in consumer packaged goods (CPG) to Levi’s in apparel, Samsung and Energizer in electronics, Mattel in toys, Walmart in retail, and many more.
In the process, we’ve developed an innovative new approach that helps our clients succeed online. Instead of dozens of different point solutions or a mishmash of homegrown spreadsheets and folders that are hard to manage, we bring a comprehensive, end-to-end solution for analytics (business intelligence), content management, and reporting to e-commerce.
Some of our clients start out using just one alert or report, such as an out-of-stock alert or a competitive price report. Others make a few content updates to improve their online product presence. As their e-commerce businesses expand, our platform future-proofs them, enabling them to scale their insights and operations at the same time.
Every day we learn from our clients about their challenges and opportunities. We update our software, training, and best practices to reflect their input and our own knowledge about how best to succeed in the fast-paced and highly competitive world of e-commerce.
In this book, I share my key learnings about what makes companies successful in navigating the shift from in-store to online—from bricks to clicks. It’s a transition that’s been years in the making, but it’s one that has taken on renewed urgency now that e-commerce represents more than 10 percent of U.S. retail purchasing and is the fastest-growing business segment for most suppliers and retailers.
You will learn about the following:
How the most successful brands and retailers are transforming their organizations to address the challenges of e-commerce—and how they’re leveraging e-commerce to drive organizational transformation
How to bring new, high-potential technology platforms into your company with low risk
How computerized algorithms are disrupting traditional channel management and how you can regain some of the control those algorithms have taken away
Key e-commerce metrics and how to go about measuring them
How to manage your brand online and ensure brand integrity for your products across many different retail customers
How the most successful companies are navigating the transition from in-store to online—companies I call the bricks-to-clicks companies
This book is not a guide on how to set up your own e-commerce store or how to make money in your spare time selling items online. This book is the story of how industry leaders are transforming their organizations—and the associated processes and technologies these organizations depend on—to be leaders in e-commerce. Think of it as good to great for e-commerce. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Acknowledgments
Writing a book is a challenging undertaking, but building a company is an even more challenging one. In undertaking both efforts, I have been truly humbled by the ideas, support, and help from our employees, clients, investors, advisers, friends, and family. Neither this book nor my company, Content Analytics, would have been possible without you.
Far too many of you have helped in more ways than I can count for me to list you all here. To all of you: thank you. I have learned so much from your involvement with Content Analytics and am deeply grateful for your willingness to share your deep business knowledge, profound insights, and creativity. Thank you to Mark Stamps for his technical review and to the team at Apress for their hard work in making this book a reality.
I would especially like to thank my beautiful and inspiring wife, Nicole, for all of her help and support.
Contents
- Chapter 1: Transforming the Organization
- Chapter 2: Regaining Control
- Chapter 3: First Insight, Then Action
- Chapter 4: Confront the New Path to Purchase
- Chapter 5: Activate Your Brand Content
- Chapter 6: Using the Master Catalog
- Chapter 7: The Retailer Challenge (and Opportunity)
- Chapter 8: The E-commerce Flywheel
- Chapter 9: From Bricks to Clicks to Omnichannel
- Glossary
- Index
About the Author
David Feinleib
is the founder and CEO of Content Analytics, the “Control Center for eCommerce.” Prior to Content Analytics, David was the managing director of The Big Data Group, where he produced the well-known Big Data Landscape. Previously, David was a general partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. David cofounded Consera Software, which was acquired by HP; Likewise Software, which was acquired by EMC; and Speechpad, a leader in web-based audio-video transcription. He began his career at Microsoft. David holds a BA from Cornell University, graduating summa cum laude , and an MBA from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. The author of Why Startups Fail (Apress, 2011) and Big Data Bootcamp (Apress, 2014), he is an avid violinist and four-time Ironman finisher. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife Nicole.