Let’s face the facts, it’s a tough job to be a retailer these days. Competition is fierce, customers are demanding, and product margins are razor thin. Just when retailers finally get that product into a customers hand and out the door, it can come marching right back into the store as a return. In fact, studies estimate there are tens of billions of dollars worth of product returned back to retailers, and very small percentage of those are actually defective. This means that brick and mortar retailers have plenty of fully functional open box products gathering dust on shelves and are missing an opportunity to get these units back into the hands of customers.
All of our local Best Buy stores are challenged with returned products. Our physical stores can be silos of beneficial product data, especially when it comes to the availability and reduced price scenarios presented by open box products. Up to this point, our open box items have not been openly displayed on the web — we tend to focus on new, unopened products, leaving an huge unmet opportunity at the store level to increase web visibility to returned products.
While this seems like a large problem to tackle, we have found a forward-thinking way to increase the visibility of open box items at our local stores using the power of open source software and open front-end semantic data standards without employing traditional marketing tactics to push individuals toward these products. Earlier this month, we began rolling out the capability for store associates to contribute to the web of data while increasing visibility to their local open box products through a simple WordPress plugin and RDFa templating mechanism. Each Best Buy store is empowered via their local store WordPress blog (background here) to enter the SKUs of the open box products they have in their inventory. The plugin fetches the relevant product data using Best Buy’s Remix API and the user is prompted to enter the open box price and a reason the product was returned. With one last click, the user saves the data and the product is published to the store site, is made available to the semantic web through front-end RDFa templates and auto-generated XML sitemaps.
There are some interesting features, techniques and potential outcomes of this work that are worth discussing:
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There is a good amount of chatter about the semantic web out there, but not a ton of concrete, working examples. I decided to put our Best Buy data to work and publish BBY SKUs in RDFa, using the GoodRelations e-commerce ontology. As I see it, simply publishing the RDFa is not an issue — the challenge is to apply real-world style and structure to the code to make it both machine and human readable. I’m trying to answer the question: is the RDFa model flexible enough to allow Joe Web Developer to successfully publish valid structured data while satisfying the desires of his design, business, and marketing counterparts?
I’m pleased with the first round of results, ~460K worth of “next-gen” product detail pages. Take a look at some choice example SKUs from the Best Buy product catalog:
Interested parties can get a full URL list here (txt, gz), or split up into list 1, list 2, and list 3 (txt).
Thanks to: Martin Hepp, Andreas Radinger, Alex Stolz, Yahoo! Searchmonkey, Jason Galep (design guidance), and Best Buy Remix.
I saw an interesting post today via Twitter from a local person hosting an SEO competition to see who gets the highest Google search result for the key words zompire dracularius. I am officially throwing my hat in the ring. Recently I have been investigating how good semantic markup (including RDFa/Microformats) in the front-end will improve or change the way search engines work — basically how POSH (plain old semantic html) delivers data directly to the browser with particular markup. For the purposes of this test I have employed some semantic markup techniques, plus a few other tactics to raise the visibility of my post:
- Using RDFa in my posts (dublin core)
- Creating a “human readable” URL for this post using permalink structure built into WordPress
- Providing links to the original post and other sources (I will attempt to trackback, although no trackback link is published)
- Send to social networking sites I participate in — this is done automatically when I publish a post on my blog to Friendfeed, Twitter and Facebook
- Attempt to leverage my blog’s overall visibility to force my post about zompire dracularius to the top
- Leave a comment on the original blog declaring the contest
- Have an adequate number of references to “zompire dracularius”
While it seems a little “Black Hat SEO”/ dirty to me, I will ignore that feeling for a while for the purposes of the experiment. Results to come!
