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You might have noticed a few new changes at RSR recently. For starters, we have a brand new website, and hopefully you like its layout and usability as much as we do. It’s been a long time coming, and we’re really pleased with how it’s turned out. A

nd in our most recently released eCommerce study, we elected to reformat the report’s Executive Summary up front. Instead of writing a full page summarizing the “story ” of the challenges, opportunities, inhibitors and technologies retailers identify in their eCommerce operations, we highlight what we think are some of the most interesting data and takeaways from the entire report, and serve them up in short, digestible, bullet points. As always, your feedback would be greatly appreciated – does this format make the report’s findings more useful to you and your colleagues?

What we’re grappling with is, of course, whether or not this new approach significantly addresses the depth and breadth of the full report. In a world of 2 second soundbytes and media clips, our intent is never to oversimplify a complex business issue. We know that every report’s full value is in reading it cover-to-cover, but the right summary’s value is very important.

Here’s what the executive summary from the eCommerce Benchmark looks like:

• Retail Winners are far more interested in revisiting past efforts to build communities to help consumers engage with them; more than twice as many Winners express the ability to provide more ways for consumers to connect with each other through their brand as a top-three challenge.
• Operationally, retailers report that their top challenges are understanding how different customer segments engage online and difficulties coordinating with other channels to create a seamless cross-channel experience. Laggards don’t even know where to start in creating a differentiated online experience; Winners have made significant inroads, understanding that inventory plays a key role.
• Retail Winners feel the need to upgrade their eCommerce channel, either to accommodate cross-channel capabilities, or in the case of online pureplays, to create an outstanding online experience that eclipses the need for stores
• The biggest eCommerce opportunities come from the cross-channel imperative. Retail Winners agree that the eCommerce platform will serve as the central point of all digital activity across channels; laggards have less clarity.
• Winners are more focused on online merchandising and the rich media that goes with it, while laggards are looking at search and browse as their most valuable capabilities.
• Winners are also more focused on improving the fulfillment process – a very mechanical aspect of eCommerce and cross-channel, as well as more targeted email campaigns.
• Retailer increasingly recognize the need to prioritize and start managing the technologies customers will appreciate most sooner than later.
• Retailers are becoming less beleaguered to allocate human resources to experiment with new eCommerce offerings.
• They no longer believe that piloting these new offerings will be as painful as it has been, even in very recent years.
• Supply Chain Executives’ input is drastically underrepresented in the strategic direction and management of eCommerce going forward.
• Retailers continue to focus on ‘bread and butter’ technologies, such as online analytics product reviews, and product recommendations., Retail Winners have a disproportionately large appetite for each.
• Single-source content management is increasingly catching the attention of retailers.
• Winners also ascribe much higher value to such technologies as Product-level Social Networking Integration, Site Performance Monitoring, Distributed Order Management, Internationalization of Site, User Tagging/Personalization, Product Video, and Self-learning Search/Facets.
• Many retailers have delayed an investment in POS in anticipation of the day when their eCommerce platform can perform double duty. [/unordered_list]

My question is really this:

“Does this format accurately address what you look for in a summary from an RSR Benchmark Report on eCommerce, or would the hard statistics and graphical image of one data point – what we identify as the singular most defining data point of the report – add more value for an Executive Summary? ” Further, if you prefer the new format, would it be even more powerful – or dizzyingly overwhelming – if we were to include the percentages for each bullet point?

I ask because we practice what we preach, and want to ensure our customer service efforts are notcarried out in a vacuum. For many in our industry, our benchmarks have become their absolute turn-to for the most objective and powerful information available,and while we’re very proud of that, we know you’re starved for time. So as we evolve in our efforts to get you the information you require in the mosteffective manner possible, we would love to hear your thoughts on what works best for the most important person in the equation: you.