clintgc

two weeks into the new gig @backccountry.com and like any new opportunity i’m getting to know new faces, a new culture and some new technology. maybe i should use the word “different” instead of “new”. is ecommerce new technology?

back a few months ago when i was first interviewing w/ backcountry and thinking seriously about a jump from mozy a friend of mine asked why i would even think about ecommerce “it’s not very bleeding edge”. at least compared to the mozy distributed file system (20+ petabytes, processing power, redundancy & protocols) or other cloud computing services an ecommerce platform lacks the blood.

but maybe my friend is wrong … first of all i’m sorry for using “cloud computing” it’s a buzz word like web 2.0 that won’t go away because no other pithy definition exists for distributed web application and storage environments exist. however, over the past few years ecommerce has been influenced by social applications like facebook, twitter & the variety of blogs out there. of course the subject of “community” and “conversation” , which are enabled by the above mentioned applications, but now the bleeding edge for ecommerce companies and the googles of the world is to create context through implicit/explicit actions and crunch models to provide rich experiences online.

a negative example: i buy a lot of things from amazon, but why do they keep recommending Nintendo Wii games to me. i’ve not bought a Wii game from them in over a year? at some point that should decay from their recommendation algorithm and move on.

backcountry.com is a great catalogue, but it’s not a great user experience. i’m excited to tackle this challenge. as of today i’ll be working product management for community projects, content surfacing and all things bike (realcyclist.com & hucknroll.com).  ecommerce, not so old hat in my opinion.

it’s official, i’m now spending my days as a billy w/ the rest of goats at backcountry.com. like every new kid i spent my first week in gearhead training; a five day crash course in customer service and the labyrinth that is inventory mgmt. by the end of the week my trainers (shawn & angela) had me completing customer tickets, tracking order, handling miss-ships, refunds, exchanges and even chatting w/ customers about gear. pretty sweet! i have a profound appreciation w/ the frontline troops and the warehouse dudes.

next week i start product mgmt in lovely park city, ut. hopefully it’s less product mgmt and more customer innovation. backcountry has done some great things and i think their site is a great catalogue for gear, but buying experience has opportunity to be wicked awesome. anyone who’s experienced buying their first set of skis or road bike can relate to the challenges of dropping $1000 bucks on gear.

the haul from provo to park city is going to be long, but beautiful. i’m going to keep an open mind for now.

backcountry has way more than just that one site; it will blow your mind:

• backcountryoutlet.com
• steepandcheap.com (odat)
• tramdock.com (odat)
• realcyclist.com
• bonktown.com (odat)
• dogfunk.com
• whiskeymilitia.com (odat)
• hucknroll.com
• chainlove.com (odat)

yeah i had the same reaction. i’m keeping an open mind on this one too. odat stands for “one deal at a time” which means you get wicked prices on closeout gear. the sites are pretty innovative in fact, in that they motivate impulse buying, which is pretty hard online. they do this w/ limited quantities, time limits, showing you how many people are on the site and swapping new deals all day long. great concept.

one thing i realized during my week as a gearhead … snowboarders are retarded. they care way to much about matching boots, pants and board :p

i hate to admit this but the most exciting part about this job in my head at this point is the gear and wicked discounts (sorry discounts are only for me and dependents). need to start planning some adventures for this year.