Peter echoes the sentiments of his colleague James McQuivey in our last webinar, Enterprise Strategies for Capitalizing on 2012 Digital Disruption Trends, in that the adoption of new devices and platforms have far surpassed predictions. It’s an exciting time for consumers, and a challenging one for media and publishing companies that must deliver consistent customer experiences to all of these touchpoints. Simply having desktop and mobile sites is no longer sufficient. In the Age of the Customer, as Peter puts it, consumers and their heightened expectations are firmly in control.

Is anyone getting it right?

The webinar cites several examples of companies that are overcoming technical hurdles in order to deliver their content experiences across different devices:

· USA Today built an API for partners and a developer network to disseminate their content.
· Hoovers created an API that enabled Salesforce.com and Siebel to integrate Hoovers content into their own platforms.
· Best Buy and Citibank partnered to create an iOS app that used the Best Buy API to provide a way for customers to redeem loyalty points for merchandise.

But even with these technical complexities slowly being ironed out, media companies in particular face one obstacle that threatens the profitable and scalable delivery of their content across multiple platforms.

App stores, not always the friendliest kids on the block

While I love racking up 99 cent purchases on app stores, they also act as walled gardens that create huge headaches for content distributors. By owning the “last mile” to the customer and segregating them from media companies, they make it exceedingly difficult for these enterprises to build direct digital relationships with consumers.

It can become quite inconvenient for customers to enjoy a consistent ownership experience across multiple devices and platforms. So while USA Today may be doing a great job at disseminating content, their actual subscription offerings are highly fragmented due to restrictions imposed on them by individual app stores. You can’t just buy one subscription to use across all of your devices.

To add insult to injury, most app platforms also take a 30% revenue share from content sold within their walled gardens. Even worse, many also retain the all-important customer data and provide limited access to subscriber information and analytics.

Will HTML5 be the kryptonite?

In order to bypass these restrictions and covenants, some media companies turn to HTML5 as a technology solution. Using this standard, content is consumed through a browser rather than a native application, and in the webinar, Peter examines some of the pros and cons of this approach.

A new kind of technology platform

Finally, Peter dives into the unique features and services that companies interested in digital commerce must look out for when evaluating technology solutions:

· Digital cross-selling and bundling
· Asset protection
· Subscription management
· Entitlements and authentication
· Globalization support
· Alternative distribution models
· Open commerce APIs

He singles out entitlements as a particularly important capability. This boils down to how an enterprise understands who you are, and what content you’re entitled to consume on which devices.

More Questions Answered

The action continues in the lively Q&A that follows Peter’s presentation, where we were able to pepper him with some of the burning questions that often come up conversations about digital disruption:

· What are some of the limitations of traditional ecommerce platforms that were originally designed for retail?
· What are some of the technical hurdles faced by companies that want to be disruptive?
· What do business models of the future look like, beyond selling content and ads?
· Who are going to be big winners and big losers as this digital disruption trend progresses?
· Are there any safe bets for digital enterprises?
· Will some industries as we know them disappear altogether?
· Will the economy stall digital innovation or encourage this wave of disruption?
· Who is going to lead the charge geographically?
· What role does social media play in digital disruption?

For the answers to these and more, we invite you to watch the webinar today and learn about the strategies that enterprises need to deploy in order to survive and thrive in the face of digital disruption.

If you live in the U.S. and like to play games like Angry Birds on your smartphone (iPhone, Droid etc.), please take our survey on mobile phone gaming for your chance to win a brand new Amazon Kindle Fire ($199 value). It will only take 8-10 minutes of your time, and your input will be used in upcoming consumer research by Elastic Path and featured in blog posts in the New Year.

Start the survey here

If you provide your email address, you’ll also receive a complimentary copy of the report (don’t worry, we won’t contact you for any other purposes).

Thanks for your contribution!

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• Register to get a free website critique (there are still a couple of slots available), or just drop by and say hi.

About the Doctor Is In

One-on-One Website Critiques Do you suffer from a low conversion rate? Does your website cause headaches for your customers? Are you looking for creative ways to give your ecommerce presence an extra shot in the arm? No need to dial 911, The Doctors Are In!

During each afternoon of the Shop.org Annual Summit, retailer attendees will be able to reserve 20 minute time slots with a number of industry consultants whose expertise include multi-channel strategy, end-to-end customer experience, site design, and merchandising best practices.

These private one-on-one sessions allow you to network with industry experts who will critique specific aspects of your website, go over questions and ideas you may have, and provide tactical and practical solutions for what ails you.

There is no charge, but you must be registered with a full-conference retailer pass to the Annual Summit before you sign up for The Doctor Is In. Due to popular demand, we also ask that you limit the number of appointments to two per retailer.

How to Register

Online registration for the Doctor Is In appointments closed on September 6th, but there will be on-site registration for the remaining appointments.

Registration will be available onsite at the Annual Summit (in the EXPO HALL) from 12pm-4pm Tuesday, September 13, and from 12pm-3pm Wednesday September 14th.

Hope to see you there!

Here at Get Elastic, we’ve spent a fair amount of time exploring the importance of having a broad, consistent multichannel customer experience. Typically, we look at things from the consumer perspective, focusing on best practices in areas such as mobile optimization, usability and social marketing. But just as important as what you should be doing in these channels is how you should be doing it.

One of the hallmarks of today’s most successful online enterprises is that their customer-facing services reach far beyond traditional desktop websites to encompass everything from mobile apps and standalone hardware devices to purchasing features embedded within other pieces of software such as games and social networks. Labels such as agile commerce, multichannel 2.0, and the “internet of things” have been variously used to describe a new reality, where companies are expected to offer their customers a consistent, unified relationship experience while allowing them to conduct business and transactions seamlessly across a multitude of touchpoints. Anyone with IT experience will appreciate that this is a daunting scenario, but the ideal solution has actually been incubating for quite some time.

For many years now, good software architects have promoted the use of service oriented architecture (SOA), where building blocks of back-end functionality (such as catalog or cart features) are individually packaged and exposed for consumption by the delivery mechanisms that need to use them. But in the old multichannel paradigm, where revenue was attributed solely to “store, catalog, and web”, the idea of moving to a model designed to sell things across dozens of channels was usually a tough sell. For most organizations, it would have been difficult even three years ago to envision a plausible scenario where potential revenue from alternative channels might offset the cost and effort of migrating from a legacy system to service-oriented software.

Then smartphones, tablets, connected televisions, app stores, and Facebook happened. The explosion of potential customer touchpoints, along with the disruptive business models that often come with them, have once again propelled the SOA concept to the forefront of ecommerce thinking. Supported by technical advances in the design of REST web services that make it easier for potential channels to “plug in” and consume complex functionality, the notion of decoupling ecommerce functionality from a website and distributing it everywhere via a full-featured shopping API is finally an idea whose time has come.

Want to learn more about the next generation of shopping APIs, and how they can help future-proof your business? Join our guest speaker Brian Walker, Forrester Research Vice President and Principal Analyst, and Sal Visca, Elastic Path Software Chief Technology Officer, for a live one-hour discussion Shopping APIs and How They Future-proof Your Business on August 2, 2011, at 9:00AM PDT/12:00PM EDT.

In his narrative, Peter also advises optimizing your ecommerce store for web visitors using screen readers or speech recognition for text input by using filterable search results plus breadcrumbs navigation history as well as allowing multiple ways to search (i.e. by SKU, name, brand etc.) and holds up Elastic Path’s Optimize technology used in BEA AquaLogic Commerce Services as an example.

BEA have recently announced a new version of AquaLogic Commerce Server which includes search engine optimisation technologies from Elastic Path which will help the searcher with a disability as well as the time-poor searcher.

Elastic Path – Optimize – ensures that pages are well formed for the search engine spiders to gather complete and accurate index information.

And there are more benefits too … by making your shop easier to navigate and making ‘longtail’ product pages more findable, you will be greatly appreciated by the shopper with a disability who hates browsing through dozens of useless search results – as well as enjoying more fruitful organic search results with fantastic ROI leading to a wider audience across the Internet.

As Abrahams puts forth,

I also believe that designing the searches with impaired users in mind will highlight any usability issues and hence further improve the experience for the whole e-buyer community.

Additional Reading on this topic:

Peter Abrahams’ Accessibility and Search Engine Optimisation article and Massive business case for accessibility