New technologies and online retail Maheesh Jain Cofounder, CafePress'com

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New technologies and online retailMaheesh
JainCo-founder, CafePress.com
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Me

• Co-founded CafePress in 1999 with college
  roomate.
• Started 9 other businesses beforehand with the
  same guy.
• If you roll the dice enough times, youll
  eventually win something.
• VP of Marketing and Business Development.
• Im the marketing guy, but Ive been running
  technology companies since 1995, so I hopefully
  Ill make some sense.

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Intro to CafePress

• Online marketplace were you can design and
  buy/sell customized merchandise including
  t-shirts, posters, stickers, etc.

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What we really do

• For Creators
• Allow people to create their own products (like
  t-shirts) and buy them for their own use, share
  them with friends, or sell them for a profit.
• For Buyers
• Sell over 150 million customer designed products
  around virtually every topic.

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We sell self expression
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Vital Stats Today

• 1M stores setup on CP since 1999.
• 1M new products created every week. 150M
  products in catalog.
• A new design uploaded every 5 seconds.
• 7M products shipped in 2007
• 350 employees

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Web Experience Technical Challenges

• Retailers with long tail (limitless catalog)
  strategies are encountering a wide range of
  technical challenges. They include
• Product Search As product catalogs grow
  finding the right products is as easy as finding
  a needle in a haystack.
• Product Discovery As new products become
  available, how do you market them to the right
  consumers at the right time.
• Product Quality With so many products, how can
  you tell the difference? Are there ways to show
  quality to customers when they cant pick up the
  item?
• Web site Usability How do you architect a Web
  site to make finding the right products easy and
  intuitive?

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Problem Product Search

• Type blenders into Amazon. There are 800
  results. Good luck finding your blender.
• Product search is only as good as the product
  data the retailer has.
• Attributes are required across the entire product
  catalog that will allow the customer to quickly
  sort and narrow their search.
• Results must be displayed fast and be capable of
  being reorganized by consumer
• Example Blenders
• Narrow by brand GE
• Narrow by color Red
• Narrow by price Under 30.
• I found my blender!
• Build vs Buy decision
• Number of companies offer search catalog systems
  to help retailers solve this problem
• Larger e-tailers recognize that the true problem
  that needs to be solved with product search is
  the requirement for detailed product metadata.
  Choose to build catalog system that better scales
  with their infrastructure.

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Problem Product Discovery

• Hundreds of new movies are released every month
  on DVD. How can a retailer help their customers
  find DVDs they will enjoy?
• Personalization tools are still primitive, but
  are getting better.
• Netflix has some of the best tools to help you
  find good movies.
• Netflix has a 1M contest on who can improve
  their recommendation engine by over 10. Over 1
  year later, nobody has won.
• Example You saw Titanic, we think you will
  like
• Pretty Woman
• Dirty Dancing
• Ghost
• New technologies in the market try to solve this
  problem in a variety of ways
• Social shopping Dont try to have a master
  recommendation engine encourage your customers
  to virally recommend products to their
  friends/family via social networks, communities,
  etc.
• Algorithm based recommendation engines.

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Problem Product Quality

• With so many products available, how can I tell
  the difference between product quality?
• Back to Amazon and their 800 blenders.
• Marketing information from the vendor
  isMarketing!
• Customer reviews are becoming the standard.
• Managing customer reviews very tedious and
  resource intensive.
• The GE Blender has 4 stars. The Oster has 2
  stars. But the reviews say I cant make a good
  margarita with the GE blender.
• Requires managing relevant data.
• Identifying reliable reviewers.
• Monitoring malicious/non-relevant reviews, etc.
• New companies offering outsourced methods to
  manage this process, but larger companies tend to
  build in-house as an investment in their customer
  community.

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Problem Web Site Usability

• How do you architect a Web site to make finding
  the right products easy and intuitive?
• New technologies are constantly changing how Web
  sites are architected and products are marketed.
• Sites using DHTML and Ajax programming styles
  allow customers to view many products easily
  within the same page.
• Example Netflix and Gap.com. Both sites allow
  you to view product info without having to load a
  new screen.
• This is a combination of art and science that
  will continue evolving ongoing.

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Network Operations Challenges

• Whats on the mind of our Dir of Network
  Operations
• Scaling hardware architecture as traffic, users,
  data, and transactions grow.
• Network Speed
• Redundancy
• Network Security
• Botnets, etc

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Scaling Hardware

• Movement toward distributed architecture.
• No more large dbase (MS SQL, Oracle) and large
  servers. Small dbases (MySQL) and many off the
  shelf servers becoming architecture of choice
  (proven by Google/Yahoo, etc).
• New sites launch on cloud services.
• Newer sites have the ability to ignore this
  problem all together by outsourcing to cloud
  computing services (Amazon S3, Google, etc).
• Once they achieve some growth, bring in-house.

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Network Speed

• New user interfaces tend to make page weight
  heavier, putting more pressure on IT to serve
  pages faster.
• Most major sites partner a content delivery
  network (Akamai, Limelight) to increase data
  delivery speeds.
• CDNs are introducing new technologies that
  optimize how pages are read by browsers and
  loaded, increasing perceived page load speed.
• Essentially tricks (code sequencing, etc) that
  make the user feel like the page has loaded
  faster, though it probably hasnt.
• Faster pages can often translate to increased
  customer conversion.

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Network Redundancy

• As companies grow, the need to manage servers
  across multiple locations grows.
• Security
• Helps CDNs for international customers.
• Very expensive (duplicate hardware, software and
  increased management overhead), so most companies
  wait until they are of significant size before
  they make this investment.
• Companies like IBM offer outsourced solutions,
  but also expensive and may offer lower service
  levels during potential disaster scenarios.

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Network Security

• DDOS attacks, botnets and other security threats
  pose a significant risk to large sites.
• CDNs offer a security level as they serve pages
  on a distributed basis.
• Redundant networks next level of security.
• High end software for very large companies.

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Your Questions

• From your executive bio I see that you have a
  Bachelor of Science degree from Northwestern
  University, do you feel it was your degree or
  work experience that got you where you are now?
• Can you describe a "typical" day for you at
  CafePress.com?
• Without giving away any secrets, what do you see
  in terms of Business Development for
  CaféPress.com in the future?
• How do you keep up with the technological changes
  in the industry?
• What kind of planned redundancy does
  Cafepress.com have?
• How do you manage information at Cafepress.com?
• What are the threats awaiting Cafepress.com?
• Have you done any overall IT architecture changes
  with time?
• Do you think that Service Oriented Architecture
  is the Holy Grail?
• Which IT governance style do you use at
  Cafepress.com?
• Have you ever encountered any internal resistance
  to any change in the company?
• What is your opinion on Nicholas Carrs article
  IT doesnt matter ?
• Are there any security threats and risks specific
  to your business? What do you do to prevent or
  mitigate those risks?
• How closely do you work with your suppliers and
  business partners? How does your extranet support
  those relationships?
• What are you doing to plan for any future
  developments in e-commerce? 
• How is your IT infrastructure structured? How
  does it facilitate internal and
  externalcommunication?
• In your niche market for customized merchandise,
  who are your top competitors? 
• What type of IT Governance do you use at your
  company?
• Currently what are your biggest IT challenges at
  Cafepress?

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