The most successful online commerce businesses will be the ones that can evolve their marketing and monetization systems most quickly to make the most of every marketing channel and user click. For most businesses, however, keeping up with the pace of innovation in marketing and monetization is a daunting challenge.

Change is expensive, risky, time consuming, resource intensive and cumbersome. In fact, the very marketing automation and commerce technologies that businesses deploy in order to keep up often end up locking them in, making it difficult for them to quickly respond to new opportunities. We’re talking about new marketing channels, ad programs, retargeting partners, social ecosystems, mobile. Making better use of user data to optimize campaigns, landing pages, content, UI, and personalization.

Thinking Lean

To stay nimble, many business leaders are drawing inspiration from The Lean Startup movement. It offers a disciplined approach to rapid and continuous build-test-learn iterations in order to learn what will work best for customers and generate incremental value with minimal investment along the way.

At Wize Commerce, we have applied lean principles to grow our consumer shopping business for as long as we have been in business, and we’re proud of the results we see from continuing to foster a lean and agile culture in our company.

Here are some of the techniques we’ve found invaluable:

• Continuously running test campaigns on all marketing channels to experiment with new programs, features, strategies and settings.
• Continuously testing alternate landing pages and targeting algorithms for different channels, devices and keywords.
• Continuously comparing solutions and results from different service-providers, advertising platforms and data partners.
• Going out with a minimal viable product (MVP) in each case to get quick feedback rather than waiting to deploy a perfected solution. For example, when testing new landing pages, quickly experimenting first with several simple alternatives for testing hypotheses before investing more in development.

Most businesses today implement all of these techniques to some extent… but never as much as they like because of the obstacles to change. To move quickly and run lean, what commerce site operators and marketers need is a cheap, easy and low-risk way of experimenting without disrupting their current business.

Enter The Sandbox

What if you had a copy of your commerce site that you could play around with, tweak, and test on users without touching your main site and without requiring a lengthy development process? What if you could instantly try out that new marketing channel, retargeting partner or SEM program without disrupting your current campaigns?

A sandbox is a place where you have the power and control to quickly iterate and gather feedback that you can use to grow your established business. A familiar concept to software developers, it’s an isolated environment that you can update quickly and where you don’t have to worry about breaking anything. Beyond merely a test framework on top of your existing site, this is a completely separate space that might share content and functionality with your main site but which can be experimented with and run independently from your main site, with you and your marketing team in charge.  It might look a little different and it might work a little different, but it’s still your business underneath. You get to dictate the priorities, you get to dictate the pace and you get to fail fast.

In practice, few commerce sites have serious sandboxes for their marketing and monetization teams.  A complete sandbox is complex to manage and there’s been a lack of available technology solutions to make it easy. We see this as a big opportunity for innovation.

At Wize Commerce, we’ve developed a sandbox solution, called Silhouette, which we’ve used internally for many years and have now launched as a new service for our clients. Built on the same technology platform that we use to run our consumer shopping sites such as Nextag, Silhouette enables our clients to rapidly evolve their marketing campaigns and landing pages in a sandbox to smartly grow their business.

Among its advantages, Silhouette allows you to run a fully hosted, streamlined replica of a portion of your commerce site, such as the search landing pages, in parallel with your normal site and to use this replica as a sandbox for growing revenue. Test and optimize new marketing channels, landing page algorithms, data partners, etc. Wize Commerce takes care of the work involved in running the campaigns, running site experiments, integrating data, and analyzing results. See here for more details about Silhouette.

Whether you implement your own sandbox or work with a technology provider such as Wize Commerce, we’re confident that you’ll see results from the rapid evolution and lean operation it enables.

If you have implemented sandboxes for experimentation or have applied lean startup principles in your marketing and commerce operation, we’d love to hear about your experience.