San Mateo, California-based start-up Blue Martini will use Esther Dyson’s PC Forum in Scottsdale, Arizona this week to take the wraps off its first product, Blue Martini E-Merchandising System. The start-up, which launched itself onto the market in December 1998, says it’s the first company to offer an integrated merchandising solution which includes not just a store front commerce server but also customer management, merchandise management and data mining tools and it’s proudly boasting Levi Strauss & Co as its first customer (interestingly the two companies share a board member in common).
The system consists of five modules: WebStore Operations, Merchandise Management, Customer Management, Micro Marketing, WebStore Operations, and Tools. According to Blue Martini’s VP of marketing William Evans, most companies just offer the commerce server module (the ability to get yourself up and running) with tax, payment, security, shopping list, and catalog operations – over the web. But he says that just selling products doesn’t allow companies to find out anything about their customers. Around 95% of businesses’ revenues are made through their street front stores, says Evans, which means only the retailers on the front line know who their customers are. But Blue Martini’s software aims to overcome that by enabling companies to gather more data about customers, analyze it and feed that back dynamically into the system.
To that end, the Customer Management module manages customer attributes (including likes, dislikes and personal information) and transaction histories. That data can then be combined with data about merchandise in the Micro Marketing module to deliver targeted sales solutions, cross-sells and up-sells, as the customer shops. It also creates gift registries, frequent buyer programs, and other customer retention incentives. Merchandise Management enables companies to describe their products in flexible groupings with an unlimited number of attributes assigned to each product. Attributes can describe target markets (young, casual, retired), as well as individual products (size, style, color) or groups of products (all cotton clothes or all men’s jeans).
For its Micro Marketing module, Blue Martini has licensed data mining technology from RuleQuest. It’s here that companies can reap the real benefits of the software, says Evans, as the tools can be used to uncover relationships between customers’ likes and dislikes and the products on offer. By feeding that information back into the other modules, using Blue Martini’s workflow software, the company is able to better market its products to on-line shoppers and increase revenues. The fifth module comprises Blue Martini’s workflow and integration tools. Integration to supply chain and financial software is enabled through DCOM and Corba and the entire suite is compatible with numerous web design tools such as Microsoft Visual Interdev, Macromedia Dreamweaver and NetObjects Fusion.
Additionally, rather than using Blue Martini’s own WebStore Operations module, firms could substitute the server for Microsoft’s Site Server/Commerce Edition and still use it in conjunction with the other Blue Martini modules. The software is still in beta but will enter production on March 31. It’s designed for Intel/NT platforms and comes with support for Microsoft SQL-Server. The company also plans to add support for Oracle’s 8i database and Sun Microsystems’ Sparc/Solaris platform by the end of April 30 and other Unix platforms will follow. Prices for the full suite of five modules start at $500,000, but will increase depending on the size of the organization.
