A blog on eCommerce, Social Commerce, Comparative Shopping Engines & Business

By Hendrik Laubscher

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The 10 ecommerce stories for the week ending 16 November 2012

Bezos named Fortune Businessperson of the year, Taobao break records, Kinnevik invests more into Rocket Internet and Rakuten is active in South East Asia

We are days away from Black Friday and about a month away from Christmas. The reason why I mention these events are that every ecommerce business is now in lock down mode. Staff work more hours, technology is now watched to ensure no service delays occur etc. We are now in the part of the year in which whatever strategy was worked on for the first 10 months of the year is now to be executed.

Readers, normal service will now be returning as I am finally in the position to write some more. I was on leave for 17 days at visited the US. Catching up on the origins of ecommerce was a thought provoking exercise. I met many folks who left me more excited to be in Africa as it seems the we are the next long term play. I have much content to write along the lines of my post from last week “Who is Amazon’s biggest challenger?

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Who is Amazon’s biggest challenger?

Having read George Taylor’s interesting article on “The battle over global commerce: Amazon vs Rakuten“, I feel a bit of perspective is needed. Amazon is a true giant that spans over many different business and Rakuten is the challenger trying to catch up. However, they are not the only commerce companies that want to be global.

I spent time in Seattle and New York in the latter part of October 2012 and one company has been following me coast to coast is Amazon.com. I had meetings with folks in operations and research and Amazon was given plenty of air time.

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The 10 ecommerce stories for the week ending 12 October 2012

Walmart testing same day delivery, eBay make big changes and Bezos finally tells the world the truth about the Kindle pricing strategy.

This past week has been a big one for ecommerce and was full of story lines but most importantly, it will be remembered as the week in which Walmart made steps toward same day delivery. Let us all agree on one thing, same day delivery is going to be a huge value add for whoever does it first.

What can I say about eBay? Well for starters they are a brave company. We are weeks away from the festive season and all that it brings with for ecommerce retailers. I am not sure whether eBay will ever be able to loose their marketplace mantra. Perception plays a huge role in ecommerce but eBay it seems are trying… Mobile first development is interesting but changing their interface and search functionality is all important but the timing is of concern for me. Surely, the changes should have been made individually over a period of time.

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The 10 ecommerce stories for the week ending 5 October 2012

A few thoughts on Rocket Internet in Africa, Jabaar is looking for investment, Amazon scares everyone with their “stealth project” that has been going for 6 years and Flipkart goes into fashion.

The past week has been interesting one for ecommerce. I think facebook might just have opened pandora’s box with regards to commerce. The execution on a device level is spot on. Are they in the process of asking their page users to start paying for eyeballs? Zuckerberg is a clever founder and I think he has been doing acquisitions based on a plan. We all knew that their mobile offering was below standard etc.. a billion users with a proper execution is a very exciting opportunity.

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The 10 ecommerce stories for the week ending 28 September 2012

Yandex adds a clothing comparison shopping engine, More investment into Rocket’s fashion empire and more.

The week that concluded on Friday was the last administrative day of September. Google Shopping is on the horizon and it seems that the comparison shopping industry is also full of news. Let me be clear, Google Shopping has the potential to kill an industry and ensure that one company takes all the attention away from companies that have comparative shopping as it’s focus. Buscape losing the legal proceedings in Brazil is a bad sign, however it seems that the story is not in the record books yet. PriceGrabber’s sale not going through is also interesting but concerning (a post for another day).

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