e-commerce blog » Just for Fun

Congrats to Bazaarvoice, Austin’s Best Place to Work

ATG — Tue, 26 May 2009 23:04:13 +0000

Bazaarvoice, a long standing partner of ours, was recently awarded the top spot in Austin’s Best Places to Work. A third year veteran to this list, this year Austin Business Journal named Bazaarvoice the Best Place to Work in Central Texas in the medium-sized business category.

We’ve been teaming with Bazaarvoice for years to personalize shopping experiences by giving shoppers direct access to the user-generated ratings and reviews that are most relevant to them. Quick access to relevant content translates immediately to higher conversions online, and user-generated input, including reviews, can reach far beyond just the Web channel.

CEO and founder Brett Hurt prides himself on having a company with an exceptional entrepreneurial culture that thrives on mutually shared responsibilities at every level of the organization. This strategy is clearly working, as it encourages employee excellence, teamwork, and open communication for achieving the highest levels of effectiveness.

We tip our hats to Bazaarvoice and congratulate the company for its commitment and dedication to fostering an outstanding working environment.

Kudos to merchants in tune with their customers

Ryan Hoppe — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 22:29:21 +0000

We came across an interesting post that was included on InternetRetailer.com, which discussed the e-tailing group’s recent findings from their customer satisfaction survey. The e-tailing group mystery shopped 100 retail web sites and scored merchants on 80 metrics split into three categories: execution of key pages (25 points), merchandising (43 points) and customer service tactics (32 points).

It was surprising to see that just eight out the 100 e-tailers included in the fourth quarter survey scored an 80 or above on a scale of 100, although, Lauren Freedman, president of the e-tailing group, noted that it can be quite difficult for merchants to excel across all three categories.

Considering these stringent requirements, we’d like to offer our congratulations to those eight merchants who have continuously shown their dedication to providing an exceptional experience to their customers, and offer a particular note of praise to the two ATG customers who received this distinction.

The eight retailers scoring an 80 or above along with their scores this year compared to last and the percent increases are as follows:

• Sears, 88.25, 67.90, 21.48%
• Golfsmith, 82.25, 75.50, 8.94%
• Frontgate, 80.75, 70.00, 15.36%
• L.L. Bean, 80.50, 76.00, 5.92%
• Discovery Channel, 80.50, 76.00, 5.92%
• Amazon, 80.50, 73.00, 10.27%
• Best Buy, 80.50, 68.50, 17.52%
• Orvis, 80.00, 75.50, 5.96%

Kudos to these merchants who are also committed to improving their customers’ experiences while shopping online. Keep up the great work.

Joining Forces

Cliff Conneighton — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 19:51:11 +0000

Joining forces with eStara’s market leading Click to Call, Click to Chat and Call Tracking solutions has proven to be a key component in ATG’s goal to provide an increasingly vital channel for helping consumers go from browsing to buying. We look forward to continuing the integration of market leaders and creating more relevant interactions across the entire customer life cycle. To that end, we’re eager to post new eStara content that was once separately posted on eStara’s Multichannel Musings blog (see “Change is Good”) on e-Commerce Insights.

In the coming days look out for new content and blog entries, interviews and topics that will highlight trends and observations in click to call, click to chat and call tracking, which are increasingly being embraced by brands ranging from retailers and insurance companies to media corporations and online classifieds portals. In addition, on February 18^th all archived content from Multichannel Musings will permanently move to e-Commerce Insights. (Hint: keep an eye out for a new category called “eStara.”)

We hope that you are as excited about the momentum in this industry as we are—and we will continue to weigh in with commentary and updates. Hope to see you here!

[tags] ATG, eStara, e-commerce, e-Commerce insights, Multichannel Musings [/tags]

e-Commerce Ingenuity Business Plan Competition kicks-off

Cliff Conneighton — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 17:44:06 +0000

Yesterday was a great day for us here at ATG, as we announced another terrific quarter. With growth in overall online shopping slowing, today’s online sellers are faced with a daunting task: to win the “loyalty wars”, competing for consumers’ attention (and more importantly, their loyalty). One way that ATG leads the e-Commerce industry is by helping companies develop their brands online and successfully create loyal customer bases, hence the tremendous market opportunities a lively and competitive market creates for us. Each quarter, more of the world’s leading brands turn to us to find out how they can get ahead of the curve, and lead the next generation of e-commerce.

Today, we don’t want to focus on what we’re doing to usher in this new era. Instead, we want to know where you think the industry is going. We’re announcing what we think is one of the most exciting industry-oriented initiatives we have ever launched. We are officially kicking-off the call for entries for the 1^st ATG E-Commerce Ingenuity Business Plan Competition.

We at ATG have always fostered creativity and forward-thinking, and we want to extend this part of our corporate culture to the e-commerce industry at-large. Open to entrepreneurs, start-ups and early-stage companies alike, we’re inviting tomorrow’s leaders to share their well-developed, ingenious, and ground-breaking business plans and make history.
One will win a $50,000.00 prize to make their plan a reality!

Share the link: www.atg.com/ingenuity with all of the most ingenious people you know, or who ATG’s expert panel of judges should know. Think of professional associations, networking groups, friends, mentors, students, and all types of visionaries. Spread word of the competition to your friends and colleagues that need inspiration or who have already started developing their e-commerce dreams – and be a part of this exciting initiative.

Let the competition begin!

[tags] ATG, e-Commerce, Innovation, Ingenuity, Business Plan Contest, Thought Leadership, Startups, Entrepreneur, Competition [/tags]

Gartner Commerce Magic Quadrant is out…please excuse a little shameless self-promotion!

Cliff Conneighton — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 17:22:48 +0000

Gartner recently released its e-commerce Magic Quadrant (written by Research VP, Gene Alvarez) and we are thrilled with ATG’s placement in the Leader quadrant. ATG’s positioning is the company’s best ever, topping last year’s first-ever entrance into the Leader Quad. This year, we’ve improved drastically in “ability to execute” and we’ve improved substantially in “product vision.” In fact, ATG beat the entire field in that category!

OK, OK, I’ll stop gushing. You can read the report for yourself.

[tags] Gartner, Magic Quadrant, Gene Alvarez, e-commerce [/tags]

Getting Personal

Cliff Conneighton — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 10:24:01 +0000

Bob Tedeschi of the NY Times ran a great article today which we were fortunate enough to be a part of. It features the plans of one of our customers, Casual Male. It’s refreshing to see that more and more sites are adopting personalization as a way to better their customers’ experience and thus improve conversion rates.

Welcome to the eCommerce Conversation

Cliff Conneighton — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 09:31:00 +0000

As this is the first official post for our new blog, eCommerce Insights, it’s befitting to start out with a disclosure. While this forum will house the opinions, commentary, and critiques of various people with somewhat diverse interests, it is a blog maintained and presented by ATG (Art Technology Group) and its employees. As the leader in eCommerce software, we’ve helped hundreds of web sellers produce superior online results and we are passionate about all aspects of eCommerce—from the technology supporting these web stores to the way merchandisers use them to shape the consumer’s shopping experience. Our business and our solutions are guided by the most basic principle that the stores that are most successful are those that deliver the most relevant and personal customer experience, from merchandising through customer service, and our job is to provide the platform and tools that allow our customers to deliver that superior online experience.

Of course, we think we’re doing a pretty good job at this, and it’s apparent that others do, too—just take a look at the growing number of customers implementing ATG products, and the feedback we’re receiving from industry analysts.

But the purpose of this blog is not to pat ourselves on the back or to sell you our products. Our newly re-designed website does that well enough already. What we hope to establish here is just a simple forum where we can talk about our passion—and where others can share their opinions on eCommerce, as well. If you’ve got something to say, by all means let us know. If you’re curious to know where we stand on some issue or even an industry controversy, bring it on. By starting our blog with this disclosure we hope to convey that we are only interested in having an honest, open dialogue with the eCommerce community.

So instead of belaboring that point, we might as well get started “conversing”…