Imagine there is no website

Back in 2009 at Nike, one of the briefs I was most proud of giving was a single slide. “There is no website”.

Scared the hell out of my agencies because “where do you drive traffic to?”. This was before instagram, snapchat, youtube et al when most engagement happened on the website.

But now in the social media days, marketing avoids websites like the plague. Instead, to use a really boring phrase: “ fish where the fish are”.

But ecommerce is still all about the site. Yes, sometimes its also an app however this is generally just a re-skinning of the mobile site.

And boy isn’t it a shitty experience (as you can guess from some of my past columns).

Even at Nike, it’s all about driving traffic to the store to complete the purchase.

Most ecommerce experiences are still based around how consumers use the desktop. The mobile experience is generally a simple takedown of the desktop site — often because the infrastructure just can’t catch up. The assortment generally mirrors the assortment on the PC.

Yet about zero people use their phones the same way they use their desktop.

Increasingly, ecommerce happens on the phone. Almost 80% of purchases on Tmall happen through their mobile app. Even in the US — the country where text messaging is still, somehow, a valid way to communicate — mobile commerce is now 30% of overall e-commerce.

A desktop ecommerce experience is about browsing. You happily click through links, open multiple tabs (for you kids these exist within these things called browsers — hell even the vernacular reinforces it), and waste hours looking at pretty pictures.

Mobile is immediate. It propagates our ADHD. It’s contextual. It’s non-linear in that we don’t follow links deep. One click then we’re off to the next thing.

So how do we adjust ecommerce to this?

Thats why I love the new quartz news app.

Yeah sure, it ain’t ecommerce but its a new way of delivering news; using what I believe will be the future of how brands communicate with their consumers (that is until we have chips installed into our brains that will allow us to just know).

In fact brands will communicate with their consumers in the same way that consumers communicate to each other. How radical.

So your new ecommerce experience becomes a conversation with the brand. The sales person (probably an AI) will know what you like or, if she doesn’t, will know how to find the right things for you based on your conversation.

“Hey, I’m looking for a dress like this but in blue” And I send her a picture. She comes back with a dress that is similar to what I asked for and then the process gets refined as I give her more feedback.

Of course Facebook is trying this with M. but brands should also be trying to develop this further.

As a start though, (before this dream comes reality) they should be looking at how to move their browsing experience to one which suits the immediacy of mobile.

It shouldn’t be about a long tail of product that a consumer discovers.

Its about controlling an assortment that gets delivered — no matter where they are.