Archive for October, 2009

New Site Updates

Monday, October 26th, 2009

The Alice team has been busy enhancing your shopping experience, and I’m happy to tell you about a few great changes we’ve made to the site since our last update.

1. Free Samples Tab
If you have ordered recently, you might have found a goodie bag from Alice in your shipment that included a personalized free sample (or two) and maybe a little something extra from us.  To help you keep track, we added a Free Samples tab for you that will show if your next box will arrive with a goodie bag, and what coupons are available on the samples you receive. Coupons are automatically applied when you add the product to your cart.

freesamples

2. New Product Rooms
As we’ve expanded our broad assortment of products, we’ve also expanded the ways to shop for them, including offering new rooms under “Shop By Room” to make navigation easier.

newrooms

3. Product Videos.
In an effort to offer useful information as you decide whether a product might be best for your household, we’ve added relevant product videos to view. If a video is available, you can view it on the super shelf and/or the product detail pages.

videos

We hope these updates make your Alice experience even better.  Please let us know if there are other things you’d like to see added to Alice to enhance your shopping experience.

What do you think?  Do you like the updates?  Are there other things you’d like to see added?

Posted in Site Updates | 4 Comments »

From the Digital CPG Blog-Mattel Goes Direct to Consumer Online

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

(This post was originally published on our new Digital CPG blog.  Go check it out for more news and notes on the CPG industry.)

As we’ve mentioned previously, manufacturers in non-CPG industries are increasingly using the online channel to sell direct to consumer (for example, Internet Retailer recently announced that manufacturers selling direct to consumer is the fastest growing online retail category in this year’s Top 500 Guide).

Mattel, the largest U.S. toymaker, made news this week with a new direct to consumer website that offers all of Mattel’s well known brands under one eCommerce site.  The site, located at Mattelshop.com, includes a number of innovative social features (full coverage here).

Mattel shop

It is very interesting to see a manufacturer combine its broad brand portfolio into a single eCommerce effort.  But what I find even more interesting is the analogy to the CPG industry.  Both the toy industry and the CPG industry have a retail landscape that is dominated by a few giants.  Mattel, for example, generates approximately 1/2 of its revenues from three big retailers, Walmart, Target and Toys “R” Us.  The national CPG brands have similar distribution among a few retail giants.

The takeaway for me?  A big national manufacturer like Mattel can take bold steps to go direct to consumer online without disrupting  its traditional retail relationships.  

Shouldn’t the CPG industry be in the same position?  CPG manufacturers have an assortment problem in going direct on their own (something we are trying to help solve with our shared platform at Alice.com).  Are there other pitfalls to a CPG manufacturer going direct that aren’t present for Mattel?  If not, I think Mattel is leading the way in what is sure to be a bigger trend online.

 

Posted in eCommerce | No Comments »

From the Digital CPG Blog-Will Meijer’s Grocery Express Work?

Friday, October 9th, 2009

(This post was originally published on our new Digital CPG blog.  Go check it out for more news and notes on the CPG industry.)

The Meijer grocery chain announced recently that it has expanded the test of its new online/store concept called Grocery Express into the Chicago area (coverage here and here).  The concept is pretty straightforward-the customer logs onto the Meijer website, picks out the items she needs and schedules a convenient pick up time for the order.  Armed with the customer order, Meijer “personal shoppers” grab all the items and package them up for pick up by the customer in a designated parking lot pick up zone.  The customer pays an extra $6.95 fee for the privilege of zipping into the parking lot to pick up the goods.

Webvan put a fork in the online CPG industry for several years, but innovation is starting to percolate again in this market.  For example, delivery services like Amazon Fresh are expanding, and CPG manufacturers like P&G have been making some noise about eCommerce lately.  (Our company is certainly making a run for the mainstream CPG consumer as well).

It makes sense for a traditional retailer like Meijer to leverage its existing store infrastructure to deliver an online/offline hybrid offer.  So much sense that I suspect many traditional retailers will jump on this bandwagon if the concept shows promise.  But the key question becomes whether this will attract the mainstream consumer.  Our research at Alice.com shows that shipping fees have been a huge barrier to online CPG.  Will consumers view this $6.95 fee in the same fashion?  Another high profile launch of the “order online/pick-up” model, Sears MyGopher, hasn’t faired too well.

Time will tell whether Meijer will be more successful, but we’d love to hear your views.  Is the Grocery Express concept a winner for CPG eCommerce?

Posted in eCommerce | 11 Comments »

Announcing Our Free Sampling Program!

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

Beginning today, consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers can now execute their own sampling campaigns to maximize advertising accountability and consumer value. Here’s an excerpt from our press release–

Alice.com today announced a first-of-its-kind digital sampling program that allows consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers to control the entire product sampling process—from defining a specific target audience to converting delivered samples into ongoing sales. The Alice.com sampling program is the first of many advertising programs to be launched within the Alice.com platform, and represents one of the ways in which CPG manufacturers are using Alice.com to directly connect with their end consumers and gain greater accountability from their advertising.

“Sampling has traditionally been a hit-or-miss use of our advertising dollars, because of the difficulties in measuring who received a sample and whether the sample resulted in a sale,” said John Mullins, President and CEO of Sun & Earth, an all-natural, non-toxic cleaning products company. “Using the Alice.com platform, we can now leverage a rich set of data to pinpoint which consumers receive our samples, make it easy for those consumers to buy the product from us, and precisely measure whether the campaign is actually working. It’s a great way for us to treat our customer as an individual and make sure we are spending our advertising dollars wisely.”

We’re celebrating the launch of our free sampling program with a special consumer campaign. Beginning now through October 31st, consumers may find an iPod shuffle, Flip video camera, free movie rentals and more in their Alice box, in addition to targeted free product samples. Head on over to the Community blog to learn more.

Read the full press release here.

Posted in Announcements, Press Releases, Sampling | 2 Comments »