OIDF Social Media for Retailers SummitMarch 8th, 2011

Jon Nordmark

CEO of UsingMiles.com and board member of eBags

Founder, 10-year CEO, Chairman of eBags.com

Overview

Background– eBags … drop ship, 2 million reviews, sold 6pm.com to Zappos

– ShopRunner (NewEgg, BareNecessities, eBags, Borders, Shoes.com) … Amazon Prime

– LiveClicker, PowerReviews, BazaarVoice, Certona

– Services build profitable future (Amazon Prime, Credit Cards, Cloud, fulfillment)

• Requires seamless handoffs, from site to site

Objectives– Friction-free, seamless registration (decreased memory drag)

– Registration across service providers

• Facilitate social publishing: engagement, awareness

– Faster checkout

Deployment Issues– Where product reviews were six years ago

– Limited to partner (SaaS) implementations … LiveClicker, PowerReviews

– Mind share, myopic

– Need enemy (Amazon)

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Pre-Shopping Cart integrations

Security is a laser focus

Time not dedicated to understanding

Overview

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Overview

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Overview

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Risk -Free (No-Work) Deployment

Objectives– Friction-free, seamless registration

• Decreased memory drag

– Registration across service providers

• Facilitate social publishing

– Engagement

– Build awareness

– Faster checkout

Risk-free deployments– SaaS partners

• LiveClicker

• PowerReviews

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Deployment Success

LiveClicker Success– Purpose: Marketing

for awareness and engagement

– Video published into Facebook

– Comments published back into retailer site

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Deployment Success

LiveClicker Success– Purpose: Marketing: Engagement– How to videos making use of

Facebook’s engagement platform– 10,000 people watching Auto

videos on Facebook

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Deployment Success

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Borders LiveClicker

One-offs

Deployment Success

Activity– Off-site activity

– More than halfof eBags videosare viewed off of eBags

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Deployment Success

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PowerReviews Success– Purpose: Marketing:

engagement, awareness– 100,000 reviews in a week

Opportunities

Grease the skids (of the process) … no eye-brow raisers– Confusion needs to be minimized

• Sears and Threadless

• New customers are one thing, returning customers are another

Facilitate faster, easier checkout

Connect between services … invisible handoffs

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Facebook login

Twitter login

Threadless FB login

Threadless FB login

Threadless FB login

Opportunities

Grease the skids (of the process) … no eye-brow raisers– Confusion needs to be minimized

• Sears and Threadless

• New customers are one thing, returning customers are another

Facilitate faster, easier checkout

Connect between services … invisible handoffs

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Deployment Success

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Borders LiveClicker

One-offs Coming soon:ShopRunner

Opportunities

Grease the skids (of the process) … no eye-brow raisers– Confusion needs to be minimized

• Sears and Threadless

• New customers are one thing, returning customers are another

Facilitate faster, easier checkout

Connect between services … invisible handoffs

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Data– Twitaholic

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Countless handoffs, exchanges of “customer ownership”

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Requests

For adoption into retail

– Fine-tune the UX • Test, test, test• Proven, no-drag on Conversion Rates

– Education about benefits• To marketing, merchandising, technologists

– Bring into the checkout process

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Requests

If we could get our partners to implement OpenID or OAuth providers that would help reduce friction for us, mainly by avoiding making them share their login info with Usingmiles as a 3rd party. However, that still leaves users with multiple identities & passwords to manage. I’ve already talked with the team about supporting multiple identities tied to an account, which would facilitate this.

The ideal would be if partners supported social login to their sites in conjunction with OAuth or a similar authorization scheme for us to connect to them. Then a user could login to our site with his/her Google identity, for example, and then simply go through an authorization step at the partner site (also using the Google identity) to allow UsingMiles to access their information.

  The problem I see with federated identity today is that everybody wants to

stand at the top of the identity food chain. Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, etc. support OpenID/OAuth to allow other sites to authenticate/authorize with the identities they own, but they haven’t shown a willingness as far as I have seen (except for Yahoo) to do the reverse. For example, you can’t login to Google with your Facebook ID or vice-versa. If the airlines and other businesses show a similar reluctance to give up full control of their user identities then it will be problematic to make this federated identity vision a reality.

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