Virgin Biznet - Innovation, Innovation, Innovation!
Shiran Liyanage
Pioneer, innovator, strategist, value creator and mentor. Delivers step-change commercial growth by ‘joining the dots that others don’t see’ for PE-backed SAAS, eCommerce , Retail, Logistics and Supply Chain.
Part 3
Part 3 of 4 (access to Parts 1,2 or 4 found at foot of this page)
...but, firstly, we wanted some fun. Let's help Comic Relief...and at the same time, show the country that shopping online was 'safe'.
Here's an idea - how about taking donations through this new concept called the internet?
Comic Relief - As pioneers in e-commerce, one of the main issues was that the majority of the general public had never purchased online. Also, as a young high-growth tech company, we also embraced an egalitarian ethos of community and helping society in general - after all our mission was to enable smaller specialist sellers to compete against the corporate retailers, who dominated retail at that time, and the internet environment was this great new magic leveller.
In 2000, we noticed that one of the coolest charity brands in the UK, Comic Relief, didn’t have a method of taking donations online, so our idea was to provide the organisation with an online transactional website. We engaged with the great people at Comic Relief who were excited about the prospect - it would have been the first time charity donations would have been taken online en masse. For us, it would have been a great way of introducing the experience of internet shopping to the general public and, importantly, to pacify the scepticism of this new technology as well as trust issues related to submitting credit card details to sellers of whom they had never heard.
One of the main challenges wasn’t the technology or bandwidth to execute this function, but the fact that it had to be done for ‘no financial gain’! Comic Relief’s promise has always been that no administrative costs would be taken from donations made by the public. So we had to negotiate with our payment processing partner, Worldpay , who themselves were a small startup at the time, that we would both approach this venture as a marketing spend, rather than a profitable endeavour.
So, having aligned all our ducks in a row, how did it go? In short… it didn’t! It turned out that the ‘Virgin’ brand advantage that we had in opening doors to engage with great organisations like Comic Relief also proved a challenge in this case. Other brands, who had spent enormous sums to sponsor Comic Relief to get exposure that year, felt they would be eclipsed by UK’s ‘most revered’ brand (whereas for us, the exercise was one that simply publicised e-commerce as a concept.) So the project was sadly dropped - a real pity as it wasn’t until a few years later that donations were taken online - oh well, at least I did manage to get to briefly meet a new and up-and-coming Irish comedian, Graham Norton… now, I wonder what ever happened to him? :)
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Back to the day job - Not innovating isn't an option..
Pioneering e-commerce was like a digital version of the Oregon Trail as the need to build an entire infrastructure needed to support online retailers posed a continual challenge. So the need to ‘think large’ and find innovative and compelling propositions whilst controlling costs was native to the business.
A few of the developments we were working on included:
VMarkets Shopping Mall - this initiative would have enabled SME’s to feature alongside enterprise retailers on Virgin.net, UK’s No 1 portal at the time. Today, one simply searches or visits a marketplace to find specialist and unusual retailers, so much so that even the large retailers offer their goods on such platforms and shoppers don’t distinguish between the two. But in 2000, this wasn’t the case - small retailers had a physical shop and?often only attracted trade from their local communities, unless they offered a mail order service… but that then required a catalogue to be printed and physically distributed. VMarkets was devised as a first step to overcoming this. Our clients could submit their advertising banners to be displayed directly on Virgin.net and also get featured on a ‘Virgin Recommends’ curated shopping page on the site - and because Virgin.net equitably featured all their partner brands, small retailers could be indistinguishable from larger ones. Simple and obvious by today’s standards, ground-breaking at the time.
VMarkets also drove us to think about the shopper experience of visiting different vendors, whether large or small, and totally unconnected in terms of a shopping cart. So we came up with the concept called the WebHusband - we wanted shoppers to be able to be able to browse any online store, capture items they wanted to buy, and purchase them all in a single click. We would have also been able to gain important insights into shopper behaviour (a commonplace metric now.) Unfortunately, the concept was just too advanced at the time and even now, unless vendors share the same platform, such an app still represents a challenge.
BizSubmitter Gold - Future plans for the BizSubmitter service, which submitted websites for analysis for listing pages on several search engines, was to introduce the concept of search engine optimisation (SEO) - a new and mysterious dark art at the time of re-writing website pages to be much more attractive to specific search engines and keywords. Working with partner, Sticky Eyes, SEO is still a manpower-intensive process and so, at the time, would have had limited appeal to our SME clients unless they either saw a revenue return on their website first or we could offer the service at a much lower price-point. This latter point proved to be the main challenge we were trying to overcome and concluded that the service couldn’t be scaled until new technology was available to do this (and, unfortunately, no concept of AI then!)
Broadband and Communications - Virgin Biznet already offered internet connectivity to its clients, many of whom had never connected to the internet before. Indeed, in 1999, only 1.7m people in the UK (3% of the population) were connected and almost all of them through dial up. This also meant access to our services was slow and cumbersome and another reason why SAAS took some time to be adopted as a concept. Therefore, our plan was to introduce a comprehensive ADSL broadband service, but also bundle that with VOIP phone services, and the concept of unified messaging, where a user could email, text or leave a message and it be accessible by phone, text or online. Interestingly, whilst our initiative has no relation to today’s Virgin Media, one of our potential partners at the time was NTL Telecom, who provided both ADSL and cable connectivity… who, interestingly, eventually merged with Telewest to became Blueyonder, then finally Virgin Media when it merged with Virgin Mobile in 2006.
Web Factory - This was less of a product and more of a process. As demand grew (Virgin Biznet attracted 12,500 customers over the space of just a year), our ability to provide manual website build services (as against client self-service build) became strained. So we looked to shift our webshop building services off-shore, which would have reduced costs whilst still retaining quality. Building transactional websites was in its infancy and typically people-resource intensive. Our challenge included plotting the entire web-build process (we identified 162 stages), and then to reduce this into functional blocks which, whilst still being able to accommodate a decent level of personalisation (for the time), enabled us to either investigate automating that particular block or farm out the work offshore if it needed human interaction. Because each block defined the process, this made it easy to both get quotations from potential suppliers as well as facilitating our ability to use multiple offshore teams from all over the world whilst working as a single cohesive unit.
.biz Domain - At the time, domains names could only have a .com, .net or .org ending or their country designation (eg .co.uk). One idea we investigated was to introduce the '.biz' domain name. This would have meant that, not only could Virgin Biznet (Vinginbiz.net) offer a platform and infrastructure to support SME businesses, we could also give our clients an internet ‘universe’ as well. This was a real possibility at a time when the internet was still in its early adopter phase, but proved to be an advancement too far for the business at the time - we would have had to setup an entire server infrastructure to manage this domain as well as have to jump several regulatory hurdles. Of course, history took over, and the .biz domain (along with .info) was introduced just the next year by ICANN in 2001.
VirginBiz Delivers! - A ground-breaking tiered subscription service to fully manage any retailers post-purchase and delivery experience - covering packaging, delivery services and even full distribution from a 3pl, all under a SAAS commercial model. See later…
>>> NEXT - Read on to find out (and learn) from Virgin Biznet's downfall and legacy
Part 4 - Downfall and Legacy
Access to all parts:
Part 1 - In the Beginning
Part 2 - Leading edge… no! Bleeding edge!
Part 3 - Comic Relief and innovation, innovation, innovation!
#ecommerce #pioneers? #shiran? #disruption #entrepreneurs #innovation #history #SAAS
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1 个月Amazing that Comic Relief have also been a client of Arwen for the last few years. I'd totally forgotten we worked with them all the way back then