The Best e-Commerce Site, Is No Site At All
Making a smarter, more nimble e-commerce shopping cart.
E-commerce has been left behind by the web. The focus on usability, customer experience and aesthetics that is transforming the web is in large part not finding it’s way into e-commerce. I have many of suspicions for why this is, chief among them being e-commerce has a long history of commerce without the “e”. For thousands of years stores have put things on shelves and sold them. When catalogs came out stores put things on pages and sold them. So when the mid-nineties came around and stores started selling online they put things on a page and sold them … online. In other words, stores are largely doing what they’ve always done, and in the same manner. Yes, we have personalization, geo-targeting, gamification or (insert-latest-big-thing-here), all are slightly better ways of doing what stores have always done.
This is a problem. Shopping online is not like shopping in a store or catalog, and can’t be. Online you miss the smell, touch, human interactions, chance occurrences, and physical experience of a product. More importantly, customers don’t want to go and spend time in online shops. They don’t want to browse your hundreds of menu options, or gaze at undersized images, it doesn’t matter how awesome your platform is, or how many products your warehouse has, customers don’t want to be there. Shopping online is not like going on Pinterest or Facebook, an e-commerce site is not a place people want to spend time. People are there to make their purchases and get out.
People don’t go online to shop, but they do shop online, this is an important distinction.
So where does this leave us?
Some smart person is going to realize how to do online shopping correctly and will undo e-commerce. This will most likely be a small nimble team and will leave the big commerce sites fumbling, because the future of commerce is not really a site at all. Customers are going to expect a retailer to come to them with a curated set of options, at the right time, in the right place. This may be backed up with a full retail offering online or offline, but it will primarily be for research.
We will see a role reversal of the research and the selling. Items will be sold somewhere in the wilds of the internet, and what is currently the e-commerce solution will become a research destination, if it exists at all.
There are a few glimpses of how this will work, look at NEXT (formerly Grokr), Osito, Google Now and Google Glass. Each actively provide contextual info at relevant (kind-of) times. Google Glass takes this a step further by placing this feed in your field of vision. For a more retail oriented example, Svpply a shopping curation site, delivers a personalized set of products to your phone everyday at a time of your choosing through their app Want.
There are still a lot of questions to answer; as this becomes real-time and more relevant it has the ability to tread into stalkerish or even harassing territory. There are the practical issues of supplier relations and customer demands to take care of (MAP pricing anyone?). But these are questions that only experimentation can answer. The big question is who will get there first? I know of one startup nibbling at the edges, and certainly there must be a number of others headed in this direction. I don’t think the big players will get there, unless it’s an acquisition . One thing is clear we are on the verge of seeing some fundamental changes in how retail works.
