Tag Archive for: Tesco

Tesco Marketplace Now Partly Live – Already Showing Signs of Flaws

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Tesco has soft-launched the redesigned Tesco Direct website with two “Marketplace” sellers and guess what…we’re already seeing that there has been little learned by looking at the core rival Amazon.

The Tesco marketplace have two merchants live on the platform already, Crocus & Maplins and its the latter merchant that is making it clear that Tesco haven’t really worked out that Data is the life blood of an eCommerce business just yet.

 

Product Page – Tesco Owned Item

Tesco Marketplace Product Page 1I’ll be back to that topic in a few moments, but for now let’s have a drill down of the features of a 3rd party item and a Tesco owned item. There are going to be a few comments I’m not going to make, the reason is sat in the previous articles here regarding the Tesco Marketplace.

To the right is a screenshot highlighting some key points on the product detail page, if you click on the image it’ll open in a full sized window or you can view the live item here.

My first observation is the catalogue number, its base ten and not base 36.

If I’ve lost you already let me explain. We work in base 10 from 0 to 9 (that’s our fingers which caused that), base 36 is from zero (0) all the way to Z, so numbers and letters.

Why’s that important? Base 10 has a very low number variations for products, well in fact 7^10 = 282,475,249 possible variations. Yes, that’s 282 million variations, but we’re dealing with products and as they are potentially opening the platform up to 3rd parties, then 282 million SKU’s is nothing given enough time.

A quick flip to Amazon’s ASIN’s (ASIN’s are Amazon’s unique identifier for each product, see here) and an example is B005890FU. Taking this to the ultimate limit of ZZZZZZZZZ in base 36, this is normal numbers from 0 to 9 is 101,559,956,668,415 or 102 Trillion variations give or take a few million for rounding :).

102 Trillion V’s 280 million = No comparison

Let’s go a little deeper for a moment, if I’m loosing you from the above section, this one is even more important. The product identifiers have a hyphen between them. In the case of the TV above the catalogue id is “210-7084”.

But what importance could an hyphen have? It means it’ll be parsed as a text string by a 3rd party system. If we count 1, 2, 3 etc… it makes sense, counting 210-7084, 210-7085, 210-7086 does not because they’re’s a hyphen in the way. So a sub-function that splits or removes the hyphen needs to be run, the number value then incremented and then inserts the hyphen back in.

That’s one way of doing it, it can be done with regex & other methods, but my point is, its an unnecessary and a carry-over from the catalogue side of Tesco.

After that, the rest is mustard.

We’ve got…

  • Titles that overflow the navigation
  • Customer reviews (nice)
  • Primitive bullet points
  • Poorly formatted descriptions
  • An ugly specifics table
  • Half hearted cross selling
  • I love the orange add to cart button, I really do. Have you tried green though?
  • And my last note, look at the top right, the wording has been added “Buy from *”, which changes between Tesco and the 3rd party merchant. But where is the link?

Wonky Product Data

There are two merchants live on Tesco’s Direct website, Crocus & Maplins. Nice touch on adding Crocus, I really want some onions with my TV.

My point, however is picking on one SKU, of which I assure you that if you cross compare the data between the two sites, it’s not alone. Take a look at this item on Tesco Direct. A screen shot is below.

Tesco-Marketplace-Product-Page-2

Can you see the issue?

Not spotted it yet? Take a look at the item from the Maplins site here. Look at the picture and read the title. Yep, that’s a purple product and a black title.

Dig around the other product data from Maplins on Tesco Direct for a few minutes and it’s not alone. Not to mention the pointless extra images in items such as this SKU or this SKU.

Tesco Seller Stores & ClubCard Points

I really like the idea of buyers being able to obtain “Club Card” points with 3rd party sales, there is a dedicated “Sellers at Tesco” page that you can read over here.

Tesco Seller Stores & ClubCard Points

I also like the fully customised store landing pages for both Maplins & Crocus, screen shots are below and if you click on them, it’ll take you to the pages:

Tesco Marketplace Maplins Store Tesco Marketplace Crocus Store

But to deliver this to a wider audience, that needs back-end tools in place and even Amazon have not even come close to the ~£81.4M that eBay take from eBay Shop owners every year in the UK alone and the eBay Shop is one of the most poorly supported product eBay have.

By the way if you think that number is obscene, I added up the USA & international eBay Shop revenues, you better brace yourselves for that in a later article, I did fall off my chair.

Summary

I’m going to leave this article at this point. Mainly because if I continue I’ll edge on the negative side and we’ve got to be fair here, Tesco have made a good crack at it so far with picking two unrelated merchants, even if one is odd and the other has data issues.

If let unchecked, then the Tesco Direct marketplace for Tesco is quickly going to go down the pan as far as duplicated & inaccurate data is concerned. To a data freak, this is alarming, but to be expected and I frankly did not expect it so early. It’s a nightmare/plague/cancer on Amazon with duplicates and just indicates that the process to check data needs some work.

Your Thoughts?

The grape-vine has already spilled that discussions have been made with 3rd party software providers a long time ago. So let’s run with a hypothetical question here.

  • What would you pay to gain access to the Tesco customer base?
    For both commission on sale & would you consider a start up fee?

You can let me know in the comments box below.

Part 1: Battle of The Giants – Tesco V’s Amazon – Who Will Win?

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Foreword

I’ve decided to release this earlier than what I had originally planned, its verging on the longest article I have done since University and while reading back through the first few sections its already totalling in excess of 10,000 words. So I’m releasing this beast in more manageable parts, for both me and you.

Over the next few days and weeks, I will be exploring the possibility of Tesco launching a ‘Tesco Direct Marketplace‘, to potentially rival that of Amazon (and eBay and anywhere else for that matter). I’ll be looking at the options that Tesco have available to them and what plus points they can take from their rivals and also which pitfalls to be careful of.

Its not going to be light on concepts, as with the possibility of a new platform. I am seeing this as a chance to re-write the whole idea of a Marketplace and evolve it further than what has been done before. It comes the potential to make a success we have not really seen from a retail giant, but it also has the potential to become a mess and land the company in an awkward position publicly and possibly financially.

Introduction

2010 was a really interesting year as a by-stander, eBay has made more steps towards taking on Amazon directly (single styled listings etc), Amazon had a stab at eBay suggesting to sell granny’s unwanted lamp she had a Christmas present on Amazon (rather than eBay, amongst other smaller things), Amazon had a stab at Tesco by launching food products and Tesco responded almost immediately with a direct stab back at Amazon with a PR release that they were to be taking on Amazon with a new marketplace.

While all this has been going on Play.com have been relatively quiet and literally cleaning up, a recent satisfaction poll have them ranked right behind the two Amazon’s in third place beating the likes of John Lewis, Apple, M&S and so on…

However Play.com isn’t going to be the focus of this article, what I am going to be doing is exploring the idea of what could be done and how I would suggest its tackled, if Tesco was seriously considering launching a new marketplace to rival Amazon.

I’ll warn you now, I am expecting this article to be in the realms of thousands of words, I have even been thinking I could use this as a base for a dissertation, its bound to end up in that scale of coverage, although having never completed one and never having received any outline on how to format one, I feel I may be mocked for even suggesting this.

Note: If you have any comments I am always humbled to receive feedback, see the reply box at the bottom of the page.

Lets take a look contenders

Before we can progress we need to take a closer look at the two contenders in this fight. These are two heavy weight fighters of stellar proportions, whom both have obscenely deep pockets to dig into and a grit to make even the great Mohammed Ali run scared.

Amazon

Amazon UKAmazon is synonymous with quality, speed and trust. You slap anything on Amazon and the buyers feel extremely reassured by that Amazon logo alone. Half the time I am sure that buyers do not really know whom they are buying from, as they assumed that the vast majority of the time its directly from Amazon themselves.

With Amazon launching their fulfilment offering ‘Fulfilment By Amazon’, also known as FBA, their Amazon prime customers really do not see any difference in cost of shipping, nor really any great degree in despatch times, as its all being despatched from their own warehouses.

Lets not forget that Amazon’s original business plan in 1994 scared the daylights out of investors at the beginning of the dot-com boom, they were literally the only one that had a decade long plan, where-as everyone else was measuring in months, Amazon took the view that it takes years to bring an business idea such as theirs to fruition, just look at them now, its only just begun.

Starting in 1994 and launched on-line in 1995, Amazon for me is one of the first choices of marketplace I go to, in fact I rarely go elsewhere for my book buying addiction and since receiving an iPad  as a bonus pressy (see article here), the one click buying of books for the Amazon Kindle reader App,  has my bank account running scared.

Books and other media are a symbiont of the Amazon brand, literally if I think of a book, I think Amazon and I am not alone in this with Amazon, I believe the general Internet population are of the same line-of-thought, its almost second nature, a preprogrammed thought pattern, Book = Amazon.

I remember preparing some presentation notes on Amazon and the differences between Amazon and eBay, it was really quite a trip back, while remembering that Amazon started off with a similar start as eBay, sporting an auctions offering for merchants, but it never really caught on as eBay even then was creaming it. So Amazon launched a new fixed price marketplace called zShops, its the spin off from this, which we know today as ‘Seller Central’.

zShops was faded out, basically I believe because it was crap (interface and no way of easily creating new product), but it did work and was bundled up into what we know as Seller Central and is actually a very simple and broad system to use.

I could go off into a bender on the Amazon Seller Central platform here, but for now you need to be aware that its similar to eBay as in you are able to create new inventory records and sell on Amazon.

Amazon is an interestingly flip to Tesco, as you’ll read shortly, Tesco have a lot of the off-line bases covered, inversely Amazon have a lot of the web bases covered, a quick brain-dump on thier channels:

  1. Amazon main and international sites
  2. Amazon Prime (listed separately as its genius)
  3. Own branded product range, named Pinzon
  4. Javari
  5. Endless.com
  6. Amazon Web Stores (AWS)
  7. A9 (believe this to be Research & Development)
  8. Fulfilment by Amazon
  9. An affiliate program of epic scale
  10. The Amazon Kindle
  11. ‘Amazon payments’ a payment processor (due to the UK in May?)
  12. And a whole host of ‘cloud’ based offerings & web services

And for sales, we’re talking billions, the figure I could find from wikipedia was $24.5bn in 2009, I could not find any quoted figures for 2010, a rough stab would be at the £30nb or more.

A side note, the Amazon logo

Amazon UK

Hey Look Amazon, A to Z!

Now I’d love to say I realised this, but it was a in a discussion with a client, notice the arrow below the A and Z, We do everything from A to Z? Makes sense now, I never spotted that.

Tesco

Tesco isn’t to be shunned at all in this fight, these are remember, the retail giant of the UK and by a massive margin too. Using the figures from wikipedia, they had a market share of 30.5% in Dec 2009, ni-on double that of ASDA with 16.9%, Sainsburys 16.3% and Morrisons at 12.3%.

tesco-market-share

In 2006 Tesco launched ‘Tesco Direct, their public strategy is quoted as:

In 2006 we launched Tesco Direct , a new online and catalogue non-food offer, with over 12,500 products available online. Next day delivery is standard for small items with a unique two-hour delivery window. We issued 11.5 million catalogues last year. The popularity of our in-store Direct desks, which are now in 231 stores, continues to increase as more customers order and collect items from their local Tesco. We plan to add clothing to our online offer later this year. To find out more visit www.tesco.com/direct

I found an interesting statement on the Tesco Plc site for the year ending 28th Feb 2009, indicating that while they made an opening loss of around £22M, they were 2% up in direct comparison to UK trading profit.

The article is here and I have included the extract below

Increased productivity and good expense control enabled us to maintain solid margins and deliver good profit growth despite these challenges, whilst also absorbing initial trading losses totalling around £22m on Tesco Direct. After these costs, UK trading profit rose 12.7% to £2,381m (last year £2,112m), with trading margins at 6.2%, including TPF, slightly up on last year. On a 52-week comparable basis, UK trading profit rose 10.7%.

If you look further around thier Plc site, then some truly stunning numbers are publicly shown, I dribbled when I read these numbers, they have a Non-food sales figure of £13.1 billion, yes billion for 2009/2010. After the Christmas we just had, this has to be closer to the £15bn mark.

tesco-non-food-sales

I could not find any published figures on the sales volume for the Tesco Direct site, an guess that the site takes about 2bn, with the majority of sales being made from their main site or the other two sub sites for clothing and entertainment.

Tesco Outlet on eBay

In 2008 in partnership with Trojan Electronics, Tesco launched on eBay as Tesco Outlet, I know this as I was the person that trained the staff and the two companies on the software they are using to launch to eBay with. As Trojan Electronics is a refurbishment house, it made great sense for Tesco to leverage the refurbishment channel and sell the goods direct (well indirectly, but its far superior and more lucrative for them this way).

In October 2010, on eBay alone, Tesco Outlet according to Terapeak, scored in the region of £370K of sales on eBay, £531K in November and £488K in December, although the sales for the first few days of the year are pitiful in comparison, I can only assume that someone forgot to launch a sale.

With the £13.1bn worth of non-food sales, then you have to expect some broken kit, most of which ends up in refurbishment houses such as Trojan, however not all ends there are can traditionally retailers such as Tesco get done-over on the pricing of kit, this was actually a shrewd move by them that year, although I am pretty sure that this was started by the asset recovery sections on the Tesco Giant, rather than being initiated at Board level; Maybe its what has given them the taste to take on Amazon?

Tesco Sales Channels

Tesco know they need to go multi-channel and have been busy, what a set of channels they have, a quick brain-dump on these are:

  1. Retail Super Stores (food)
  2. Tesco Metro/Express
  3. Tesco Extra & Homeplus
  4. Catalogues
  5. Telecommunications (Tesco Mobile)
  6. Tesco Finance
  7. Tesco Direct Site
  8. Tesco Clothing Site
  9. Tesco Entertainment
  10. Tesco Outlet on eBay
  11. Club cards (noted as a separate channel on purpose, you’ll see why later)

Note the lack of Amazon here, they could have easily ported their goods on to the platform, but never did. I wonder why? But ‘Holy Cow’, these peeps have more channels and fingers in pies that one can shake stock at. Amazon needs to be scared, if its off-line, Tesco have the ALL bases cover and soon maybe, online covered more thoroughly too.

The Contenders Summary

Some 1600 words in and I’ve not even got to the juicy parts yet, but without this understanding of the two marketplaces above, we cannot compare the two together. I will not just be comparing these two either, I will be pulling in the good and bad points from other market places too to give a fuller picture.

eBay has never to my knowledge declared war on Amazon and inversely I have seen Amazon wave two fingers at eBay. I always expected for a third party such as Microsoft or Google to get in on the fight, perhaps Amazon see Tesco as easy prey, maybe now Tesco see Amazon as easy prey.

These two companies are giants in their own arena’s, it was not going to be long until the two bumped into each other and this really has the makings of something on an epic scale.

What ever happens this is going to be a battle of epic proportions and I really do not know who is going to win in the end, if either of them. But thats not the point of this article, what I am now going to explore is how Tesco can make a Marketplace to rival Amazon. Its not going to be easy.

Your Feedback

So, I’ve primed the background to these giants, one an off-line expert, one an on-line expert, who is your money on and why?

ToysRUs Negged Twice @ Day 2 +28K Listings Will help

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This is quite an old article now. I have considered removing it and I have edited it slightly since. However I decided that it would be better to leave this and the other articles on the site, as with anything, experience is only learnt through fire, this was one of those times where I could have done better and approached the subject more tactfully.

I’m leaving it, as it shows I’m just a mere mortal, like us all.

Original Article

Howdy, things are pretty busy here with some crazy sales coming through already this week, predictions are being smashed and we still have next week to contend with, which was the week I was expecting previous sales histories to be smashed in. I’ll try and keep this one to a few paragraphs.

I am away for a few days soon looking at property in Malta, but its been amazing the response back from the ToyRUs post I made yesterday. I think I hit a nerve as the stats went bonkers after that got tweeted. See the post here, sorry but it does look crap and spoils the clear cut brand they have with a cheap layout.

I looked at it again today (see here) and could not help but wonder if they should have perhaps left this under wraps for a while longer as the ID is being trashed already?

Last Year Tesco Outlet

Tesco-logo2It was a round this time last year when Tesco launched Tesco_Outlet on eBay and it was running late by 2 days because the design was held up and it was launched on the Tuesday when I was away[in Malta]. Jeas that was some ‘faith’, Kim, I am forever indebted. There was no way I could get out of the trip, for the men out there, when you get ‘the look’ you know the answer is a no.

It was mad, the UK’s largest retailer launching live on eBay UK and I was not around.

A well briefed Kim [Implementer at eSellerPro] was on the case though and I had put four days on-site in previously, Clive and the Team were well versed (also inherited my odd perversion to eBay customers) and I am happy to declare that the first week sales were crazy and all-in-all pretty smooth. The full page add in the Times helped.

Even though I knew I had had the planning & all the ground work done and knew the the Team were there, it was quite a nervous trip and I did have a sleepless night which involved the trashing of the eBay ID. What if someone has a massive grudge against Tesco and trashes it, they must have pissed off at least one customer…? But we were lucky and nothing eventful happened. They did get the odd negative, but the Team were able to resolve them amicably.

Ouchy, Negs!

Back on topic, to ToysRUs, I think now with hindsight of Tesco Outlet, it would have been better to soft launch, built some feedback up and then swapped eBay ID’s, at least to build a buffer. Even more when you see the below:

So much for the few paragraphs, I do feel for the chaps & girls that must be behind the scenes on this project, I am sure a few favours will be pulled in and those negs will go eventually. Laying down +28,000  listings will certainly help, even if they do look crap :)

Tesco Taking on Amazon, Great Choice!

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Tesco Logo

Update: This article has been expanded upon further, see Part 1: Battle of The Giants – Tesco V’s Amazon – Who Will Win?

The PR wheels have been turning for the past few days on the news that Tesco is to take on Amazon. It was interesting reading the comments left by users on the article posted on Tamebay, as they had a distinct eBay feel to them.

Amazon in many ways is almost the perfect model to follow, its core differences between its  marketplace and eBay are reason for its huge success year on year.

The Marketplace Differences

eBay UK LogoeBay facilitates transactions between buyers and sellers, but does not sell or create product to sell on its own marketplace (like a ‘farmer’ hosting a ‘carboot sale’), where as Amazon is its main (note not sole) selling platform which ‘allows’ other sellers to sell along side ‘it’ and to use the Amazon umbrella.

Another huge differences is the way inventory is handled, eBay is still a free-for-all, although a few categories like Sat Nav and DVD’s are moving towards single listings, multiple sellers, but for the best part, its a mess of same items all designed and displayed differently [this is both a positive and a negative] in vast amounts of listings.

Amazon UK

Hey look, Amazon!

Where-as Amazon’s structure is quite different, this is a true single record > multiple sellers environment and its a fight based upon ‘mainly’ price. So instead of creating a listing per seller, its one listing per multiple sellers.

This is not without its complexities over duplicate records and damn annoying duplicate barcodes especially in the media categories (sold a book when it was supposed to be some fancy dress item, grrrr) but generally the system works, if its to work then Tesco need a backend system that can cope with the creation of new records, a way of verifying them on multiple criteria and allow edits to them to maximum inventory creation potential.

Seller Thrashings

Another fundamental difference between the marketplaces is that you can generally talk around eBay and cover up miss-haps. If you piss-off Amazon, then you are screwed. Its their marketplace and if you let their customers down, then you better have a damn good contact list to start bailing on, its extremely rare for sellers to get back on. I know of only perhaps just three in almost 10 years.

OoO Wait, What About Play.com?

play.comIts worth noting here that no-where I have seen has anyone mentioned Play.com, not I think this has a potential in itself. Again for those new to the different platforms, Play.com offer something called PlayTrade and PlayTrade Pro, which allow sellers to sell on their platform along side their existing stock.

Now the biggest limiter (by their own design I hasten to add) is that Play.com have chosen to the stance that ‘if its not in our database you cannot sell it’, which in many ways keeps things cleaner, but also seriously stunts their growth when compared directly to Amazon.

Yes you can ask Play to create new records, but the data better be squeaky clean and its not a fast process by any means as from I know if its checked manually [poor Chris B!].

Processing the Sales Data

The other no-brainer for Tesco is that they can pull an Amazon style javari.co.uk on the data they pull. Again for those who don’t know this, remember you are selling on Amazon’s platform, they sell there too, its their platform. So when they spot a sweet spot, like footwear, don’t be supprised if they do a javari.co.uk or an endless.com with this data. If I was Tesco, I’d be gunning for this data, data that says what sells, when, how and who for, its utter insane when you think that Amazon have been doing this for years and haven’t even started to monetize their data to sub sites.

On a side note, checkout javari.co.uk and endless.com they are super slick and not a patch on what Amazon have released in the Amazon Webstore platform for merchants.

Integrate, Integrate, Integrate!

Now if Tesco is going to open its doors to other sellers, then it better have some ‘common’ tools at its disposal to enable sellers to port data (coff, just like Play.com did) from existing marketplaces (Amazon) and enable its use on their own site.

A few common sense things, like keeping condition codes the same as thats used on Amazon (coff Play.com) and file formats would be a good start. One thing that Amazon lacks on in direct comparison to eBay is that its API isn’t that great. eBay’s API has to be one of, if not the the best documented & thorough API there is.

Working with 3rd party tools like eSellerPro , Channel Advisor, AManPro etc is going to be key to the marketplaces success, I really do not see such a channel taking off if no-one can list data there quickly, especially the businesses that already have great data sat there waiting to be deployed.

Fulfillment By Tesco?

Infact I don’t even want to contemplate this right now, but thinking about it for a few movements, if Tesco are smart enough to take a swipe at Amazon, why not go for the jugular and take some FBT (Fulfillment By Tesco) as well? Buy up a third party like ProFS, bingo instant fulfillment network to take on Amazon’s. See crazy stuff! My head hurts on the sheer potential they have here.

Tesco Affiliates, Amazon Style

Another topic that I have seen absolutely no-one mention and that is affiliates. For those who have never heard of this concept, its simple, you transfer a customer that converts, you get a commission (its what I have been hiding away doing for the past few months on a larger scale).

My point is, Amazon have BOAT LOADS OF AFFILIATES and the crazy thing about their affiliate program is that they offer 24hr cookie where the rest of the industry is around 30 days, but Amazon converts like crazy, times this by thousands and an astore product that is simple to use for community sites and can be deployed in minutes.

Its like an army of sales staff working for you, its crazy.

Note to self, need to find out the figures quoted for Amazon affiliates, I am sure they account/contribute for a massive amount of the total sales revenue of Amazon.

So Matt Your Point Is…

Tesco would be insane to try and copy eBay, by-god thats a dirty marketplace when you compare it to Amazon. I have no idea how this is going to pan out, a new site or a bolt on module to their existing Tesco Direct site at http://direct.tesco.com/ (which again for those did not know it has a proportion of an amalgamation of supplier feeds branded as Tesco, well and some Tesco owned items too I suspect).

If its going to work, they’re[Tesco] are going to have to push their brand name to the limits of what can be pushed. That Amazon logo instills a sense of comfort & trust that just isn’t found elsewhere on the Internet and is going to be extremely hard to get anywhere near to it, regardless of their starting base.

They’re not going to need luck, they’re going to need some damn gifted management heads, every single corporate based tool at their disposal and some fairy dust for good measure.

Exciting times ahead for all of us, be sure of that.