Christine X Ng

I’ve migrated my thoughts to Quora…

My blog has been reduced to cute cat pictures, and my thoughts lately have been on Quora. Follow me there if you’d like to see what I’ve been thinking about.

http://www.quora.com/Christine-Ng

Thinking about Polyvore

I was just reading an interview with Sukinder Singh Cassidy, the CEO of Polyvore, a company that I’ve been watching for awhile. While they have a great premise, a strong user following, and a great deal of attention from the media, I’m puzzled by how they truly will use their site to improve the shopping experience. Rumor has it their data isn’t structured, their user base is scattered, and their top performing ” brands” are really not correlated (15 year old girls + Balmain does not a sale make.) Sure, you can offer product click through links, but would are their product links integrated in such a way that they can truly lead to a sale?

So what is the allure of this site to consumers? Seems like it helps curb shopping addiction and the urge to buy. This is substantiated by the opinion of a 43 year old marketing consultant in a NY Times article about the power of social discovery shopping:
” Gail Helmer, a forty-three-year-old marketing consultant and Polyvore user, said: “making sets really feeds that shopping urge in me, without having to go and spend all that money.”

Why would any retailer want that effect to occur? We’re trying to narrow the purchasing funnel, not persuade these users not to buy by helping them curb their shopping urges.

How would you remedy this though?

Suggested changes to Polyvore:

1) Constrain your product catalog and perhaps target products by user segmentation/age/affluence.

Make sets from brands that your user can actually afford. I realize that stifles creativity, but perhaps if users actively see products that are accessible to them, they might actually purchase.

2) Provide cheaper alternatives to the items they are selecting.

What if I was able to see ” cheaper alternatives” to the items I am selecting? Perhaps, they should start correlating these items to ” users who picked this, also picked this”, and then again, constrain by user. This might require some serious manual item tagging ( which is probably painful) but perhaps, it might be effective. This could be deployed when doing tests/promotions with specific brands. If a user does not convert on a YSL jacket, perhaps they will on a F21 one. They have suggestions already enabled on site, but they are often are in the same price range as the item that has been selected. Also, I wonder if they are doing manual selection versus editorial selection — some of these items are radically different in style.

Well, seems as if Polyvore still gets lots of attention — but I can just see this data being sold off to e-commerce companies, so as long as the data is refined and relevant, we’ll probably start seeing them make some serious money.

The new job retrospective, one month later

So I’ve landed here, in e-commerce for a large cosmetics company, Sephora. It’s been a childhood dream of mine to work for LVMH, Sephora’s parent company, ( aside from the other childhood dream of becoming Anna Wintour at Vogue), and it’s definitely been interesting so far. Having worked in tech for nearly all of my career, it’s been a really different environment here, since brick and mortar retail is still the core part of Sephora’s business. Nevertheless, our e-commerce business is still a sizable part of the pie, and I’m excited to see some really significant strides that are being made here to make it bigger.

I’d say the biggest changes for me would be:

1) Third party integration: at eBay, we built everything in-house. Here, it’s not the case, and despite having had experience integrating solutions, I’m still getting used to that.

2) Inventory. eBay never had inventory. I never had to think about how my decisions would affect inventory management, point of sale systems and in-store merchandising, so now, I actually have to think about that!

3) I think I’m one of 3 tech-oriented nerds here. Instead of talking about tech geeky stuff, I hear more conversations about effective mascara wands and the cuteness of shoes. Pretty funny when you think about it — I think I am still more emotionally attached to my iPhone than I am to my blush. My boyfriend saw me tear up when I couldn’t get the iPhone 4 on pre-order immediately. ( I even created different test cases to see if I could make the order go through.)
Fortunately, I can still chat about these things with my friends outside of work, so it’s all good.

4) Product meetings (literally). The happiest meetings I have are when brand people come in and give product (makeup) demos. I get free makeup, and I love it!! It’s a welcome break from the ” real meetings” that we have :)

Overall, I’m learning new things everyday, and that’s all I can hope for now.