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Zobrist Consulting is a leading service provider and independent software vendor dedicated to developing e-commerce applications on the IBM platform. Zobrist Consulting offers deep skills in e-commerce and a relentless pursuit of excellence, meaning peace of mind and guaranteed success for customers looking to build multi-channel commerce. Below is our interview with Teresa Zobrist, President and CEO of Zobrist Consulting:

Q: Teresa, tell us something more about Zobrist Consulting and your core competencies?

A: Core competencies include designing, building, launching and managing digital commerce websites for B2C, B2B and marketplaces. The Zobrist Consulting team excels in building award-winning B2C sites such as TheNorthFace.com (2008 IBM Leadership Award for Best B2C), Lee.com and Wrangler.com (2009 IBM Leadership Award for Foundational Leadership) as well as Business-To-Business (B2B) websites. They recently added SaaS (Software as a Service) to their portfolio by launching two products: Smart Merchandiser, a visual merchandising tool and Mobiecom (Mobile Commerce) on the IBM Cloud.

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Q: You’ve recently introduced Mobiecom – a high performance mobile-first ecommerce storefront for IBM Digital Commerce; could you tell us something more?

A: Typically, when you build a website, it’s always better to start from a template rather than from scratch. So, for the IBM Commerce platform, IBM provided a starter store that most everyone started from and then customized. We have worked with the Java technology for the past 15 years or so and it’s just too hard to maintain, it’s slow and it’s not responsive. This is why we decided to start from a clean slate and created a new storefront for IBM using ReactJS, along with many other new technologies. We launched it in the IBM Cloud. It’s blazing fast and mobile-first. I am hoping to get the word out to IBM customers, so they can take advantage of it on their migration to IBM Cloud. Most sites are too slow and not responding fast enough for mobile shoppers. Mobile ecommerce is where the money is right now.

Q: What’s the main advantage of Smart Merchandiser?

A: Smart Merchandiser is a visual merchandising tool for digital storefronts.

Imagine your website during the holidays. You would like to display products in an attractive way and make it easy for shoppers to find products to purchase. Without this tool, merchandisers must sift through reports to see what inventory they have on hand in terms of sizes, colors, how well they are selling and then go into databases to work with rows and rows of data to sequence them, make the changes and pray that they will display properly on the website.

With Smart Merchandiser, they can visually inspect products on the website, drag and drop to move them around on the page, click on the thumbnail to change colors, and set business rules on how to display them based on weight and availability. It’s another example of using technology to simplify and automate.

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Q: What makes Zobrist the best choice for eCommerce visual merchandising and enterprise eCommerce?

A: Never Stop Innovating. That’s our motto. We have been in the ecommerce space for 17 years and every day is a new day, a new opportunity for us to help one more customer. We love what we do!

Q: What are your plans for the future?

A: I would like to make Smart Merchandiser smarter (no pun intended) with machine-learning capabilities where we can suggest better way to lay out the products based on the shopper preferences and taste, better promotions based on inventory, location and weather, and better user experience based on browsing patterns.

I would also like to add a content management capability to Mobiecom in addition to the transaction engine that we already have. The combination will be awesome and make it very powerful product.