Increasing product and service visibility through front-end semantic web

Triplifying commerce: Increasing product and service visibility through front-end semantic web

Jay Myers

2010 Semantic Technology Conference – June 23

Billions of products with UPCs *

* According to George Laurer, inventor of the UPC. Also find more online at GS1.org

Product discovery happens on the web

• 67% of US consumers used the Net at some point in their buying process

• One offline buyer out of two surfs the Web before walking to his favorite retailer

• … the majority (of web searchers) will start by entering information into a search engine such as Google or Yahoo!

How to Stimulate Consumers to Buy Online Making the Most of the Internet and Offline Retail Worlds by Kim Le Ouoc, Jaap Favier, Forrester, Nov 2008

Specificity yields the best results

A personal journey

Query for attributes

• Only 32 percent of retailers display consistent baseline information on the product detail page across products within a given product category *

• Valuable product details siloed in machine inaccessible tools

• Opportunity: web can deliver depth of data not achievable in traditional channels

Forrester, Nov 08“Internet Splat Map” by jurvetson

Goal: to provide more visibility to products, services, and locations to humans and machines

“Fortune Telling Robot” by Paul Keller

The tools are available now

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Use case: brick and mortar stores

“Best Buy on Black Friday” by cjc4454

Use case: local open box products

“MSI u100 in shipping box” by stevendamron

Human-driven semantics

Let’s imagine the possibilities…

Business benefits

• SEO/ product visibility• Reduce number of proprietary data feeds• More intelligent marketing – customer centric• Business prediction models/ forecasting• Opportunities to go beyond selling

Product relationships

Better informed consumers

• Purchases start with a well-informed consumer, end with a purchase

• Decrease in returns• Establishing trust through providing open,

findable information

Lower Prices, Better Devices, and the Democratization of the TV Market by Nathan Safran, Abe Garon, Forrester, June 2009

“Internet! Show me products on the Web related to Johnny Cash”

Via @manusporny, @mfhepp, April 19, 2010

“Device! Show me open box products at this store”

Let’s build a web of data together

@jaymyers

http://jay.beweep.com