Breaking the borders of Commerce down
It’s been a fun 30 years to be alive. We’ve seen the world fundamentally change in some super interesting ways:
- The birth of the internet
- The birth of personal computing
- The smart phone
And we’re now on the border of the “internet of things”. Computing, or some sort of electronic mechanism of expressing something is nearly ubiquitous in modern, wealthy cities.
We’ve seen the meaning of commerce change as each of these revolutions took place. The internet gave birth to eCommerce and the smart phone made it available almost everywhere, until it became a standard model of sourcing what we need. It is my suspicion that we are on the verge of another “desktop to mobile” type transition.
The internet of everything
On my person at this time I have three electronic devices:
- A laptop
- A smart phone
- Some Bluetooth headphones
Additionally, it’s fairly common to have a fourth; a FitBit, or other smart watch. Various medical devices in some cases.
In addition to those who are on our actual person, there are many, many devices that surround me. I am connected to WiFi, there’s an Alexa bot in shouting distance and a TV that’s in the corner.
My point is, our lives are becoming fairly seamlessly electronically integrated. I am no longer simply me, but me represented as represented by the memory and understanding of each of these devices.
The internet of lots of things
The problem is, none of these devices really talk to each other. My TV has no notion of who I am, nor is my phone able to reach out to Alexa to play music. We have a network of walled gardens who communicate internally, but do not communicate with each other or with a broader network.
However, this is changing. There are companies (perhaps Google being the best at this) who are federating these devices together to provide a fairly universal snapshot of who I am. I can log in to my TV and have my favourites expressed, or purchase a Google Home who instantly understands my calendar.
The internet that talks back
What’s missing is the context from these devices back to me, and for me to interact with third parties. Google knows large chunks of details about my life and uses that to surface information to me that it thinks I will find useful.
This provides an elegant model for using the surrounding electronic environment to make judgements about what information people will find useful. We can either query Google (with the users permission) for this information or simply just query the surrounding environment.
There are various standards in conveying physical information to our electronic environment such as Bluetooth beacons or QR codes. Historically these electronic outposts required specialist knowledge to consume, but with the recent releases of services that automatically analyse the environment looking for useful information (such as the Google Assistant) users no longer need to understand exactly what they are listening to — merely that the physical world is attempting to talk electronically back.
Commerce with context
This has some interesting implications for commerce. Our user journey has changed form that which was common only 10 years ago, where we’d walk into a store, chat to a trusted store assistant and make a purchase based on their recommendation.
We now expect a vastly larger amount of information about our product choices, and we are able to access innumerable people who are like us and who have purchased this product before, and determine what they think. We often do not even enter a store, instead having the product delivered directly to us at our place of work or residence.
However, we do not make our decisions entirely without the context of the “real world”; it is simply our relationship with purchasing has changed. Our expectation is that we can simply magically express that someone should take our money and the product will appear a few days later, carefully delivered. But the steps before that are ripe for optimisation! When I purchase a product I will first:
- Google a bunch about the general “thing”. I would like ${CLASS_OF_STUFF}, please thought leaders tell me your thoughts.
- I then do some learning about the ins and outs of a given product. With a recent Bluetooth headphone purchase, I learned about Bluetooth codecs. This does me no use, I just like to feel informed.
- I then settle on a selection, and look for a place to complete the purchase.
In the process of learning about the thing, I simply picked the information that was most easily accessible to undertake my learning. It is here where it’s possible to guide the user, and to serve them up the information they need as they need it.
In the case of the Bluetooth headphones, I started looking in a ${MAJOR_ELECTRONICS_RETAILER} at the different form factors. I would have so loved some sort of article right there that helped me make the decision, or the ability to go from looking at the product on the shelf to reading about it online.
By using context from the physical world we can allow the users to find more effective information, more quickly but in a manner that we influence and can direct to our sales channels.
eCommerce?
While it’s easy to fit the paradigm of eCommerce (some sort of website or application you visit to purchase) in with some aspects of the physical world, the goal is not simply to direct users into a known channel where they can finish their purchase.
Instead, it’s worth thinking about whether the changing nature of how we can interact with our environment has implications with how we interact with commerce. For example, a user will not interact with a voice agent in the same way they will interact with an eCommerce shop; it does not make sense to “go to the checkout” or “review the cart” while talking to Alexa. When we search on a mobile device from a store, we do not want to see “all of the things that are available” but more likely “all of the things that are in this store” or even “all of the things in the section I am standing in”.
Primitives like the “category page” or “search” might no longer make sense. Instead, it makes sense to think in terms of properties of the product; “a bag that is good for camping, lasts a long time and is black”.
This has implications for how we structure building and deploying applications. We should not have several ways to experience our eCommerce experience but rather this single entity, accessible through multiple different interfaces but who knows the same things about us.
In Conclusion
The ubiquity of electronic information and the ability for our devices to know things about where we are and what we’re doing allows us to be much more accurate in the information that we provide to our customers. Business that take advantage of this information context may see an increased conversation rate, and establish themselves as an authority on a given topic matter.
Thanks
- Manu Rülke for the initial line of thinking into this
- Ruslan Sandler for the additional discussion around this topic.
