Thanks for the great comment.

Customer reviews are changing the way people buy online: I know that I don’t purchase anything without reading some form of customer reviews. Because of that, more than ever I think it’s important to only carry products that you truly believe are extremely high quality. If you don’t, your customers won’t be happy and will likely influence other customers by posting reviews on your site and other sites. In a way, you turn over a bit of control to your customers, but if you have sound customer service and great products it can be a HUGE asset to have your customers ‘closing’ the sale for you.

Now, to your point about measuring success. That’s a bit trickier. The metrics for old-school e-commerce are clearly defined and relatively uniform across the board, but now we (and other companies) have to decide which other numbers are important in our success and which ones are ‘nice to have’ but aren’t key players in the bottom line. I think each site is unique in and of itself, and over time we’ll refine our metrics for TD based on the data we collect and analyze.

http://www.grokdotcom.com/2008/04/17/customer-reviews/

With all the talk of providing valuable content, a powerful research tool etc., most e commerce have stayed either dull catalogues where you can (perhaps conveniently or cheaply) order the things that you need when you know about them already.

It’s only now that they are coming to life and actually driving purchase decisions. As usual, Amazon is leading the way. Of course they have the volume advantage. But discussions and reviews are really excellent on Amazon, the best does seem to surface. A really interesting thing there is that they get known tech reviewers submitting reviews. Brilliant, if this is where products get reviewed, this is where tech reviewers need to go to do the reviewing.

Social Commerce isn’t going to be an easy thing to drive. Mostly because we don’t know how its going to work yet. Do you look (and think) at ‘funnels’. ‘How do I get these people from the landing page to the checkout page?’

Or do you take a different approach and look at ‘time on site’-like metrics and try to improve those (I like the idea of being able to pick someone who has conducted genuine research on the site & trying to increase the number of these)?

How do you measure your success at being a ‘resource’ it’s not your conversion rate (if your trying to attract early stage, browsers researchers etc.) or revenue per visitor or any other commerce metrics, really. If this is more of a bloggy sort of a thing then you do you want to be measuring bloggy sort of measure of success (comments, subscriptions, mentions on other bloggy things, etc.).

It’s not too overly complex at the moment.

It actually uses our internal search engine that I created a while back for DI. DI searches used to take forever because when you do a product search you want to factor in categories, keywords, and manufacturers in addition to just the product name. Those things were all stored in different tables and the process was labor intensive and time consuming.

As a solution I set up a nightly cron job that creates a “search” table in the database which essentially has only the critical information in 2 fields: item id (to tie it to the items table) and a keywords field with every search-related kw for that item.

TD uses the same little search engine, so what I did was build a plugin for the forum that runs a search based on the title of the topic and displays the results as recommended products. If there are less than 5 items returned, it fills the remaining slots with random products from the site.

Definitely lots of room for improvement, but it works pretty good for now.