Salto Partners

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eBay

Talked with ECommerce Times about eBay. The company overhauled its look. It went for a more contemporary design a la Pinterest. What is even more interesting, eBay launched a new app, eBay Now, entering the same-day delivery service. The idea is that shoppers will be able to order items from a variety of retailers — Finish Line, GNC, Home Depot, Macy’s, Office Depot, RadioShack, Target, Toys R Us, and Walgreens. The goal is to get them delivered to the consumer’s door steps in a short period of time. We are talking within hours.

 Just recently Walmart has announced a similar service. We are watching a new battle in the retail industry in which the boundaries between brick and mortar retailers on one hand and the traditional ecommerce company such as eBay and Amazon are blurring. In an analysis conducted by Salto Partners we were able to show that eCommerce vendors who deliver goods from well designed and optimized local warehouses will have a significant prize advantage over shop based delivery approaches. Our model shows that the investment in this warehouse infrastructure are significant though.

You can read the entire article here.

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Hewlett-Packard

In another interview with ECommerce Times we talked about HP. At their last earnings call Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitmen had not a lot of good news to report.

1: The PC business, Servers and Storage business were down

2: Enterprise services were the boat anchor of the business

3: The Autonomy integreation was still work in progress

 A few months later Whitmen had to concede that we are not talking about a bad quarter or two. We are talking about bad fiscal years ahead perhaps until 2016 which is light years in the tech industry. HP is in a real predicament. For many moons the company could rely on their personal computer and printer divisions to make the numbers. Those days are gone. Now, we buy smart phones and tablet computers. Unfortunately, there is not one product division that really outperforms the market. Their enterprise service business struggles.

 HP was built on innovation. This is exactly what is needed. New products, world class solutions and a lean and efficient organization that is able to sell and deliver to a world-wide customer base. While not impossible to overcome, none of the challenges that Witmen is facing can be overcome quickly. Her  problem will be time. After her first year, she won’t be able to disassociate the company performance from her own.

You can read the article here.