A group of dozens of tech firms—and two major retailers—are working on a standardized way of storing E-Commerce data for websites as JavaScript objects. IBM, Google, Adobe, Accenture and other IT software and services suppliers are backing the proposed Customer Experience Digital Data Acquisition standard, and they went public with it last week after submitting it to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in May. But only two large retailers have people working on the standard: Best Buy (NYSE:BBY) and HSN (NASDAQ:HSNI).
That's too bad, because the problem of all the incompatible, vendor-specific data formats for shopping carts, product identifiers, transactions and customer information is costing retailers money to integrate and maintain E-Commerce sites. It also locks chains into specific vendors' formats—and vendor lock-in is very much a dollars-and-cents issue in retail IT. Any retailer's E-Commerce group that doesn't start tracking this effort now may soon either be paying or playing catch-up.
