Electric Thoughts in a Digital Era | A blog on eCommerce, Social Commerce, Marketplaces & Business

What is in a name?

I have been thinking, and it seems that I have missed a detail. Not my style or how I operate daily. I made a decision a year ago and assumed that I would one day explain it. The time has come for a brief description of my domain name.

So the obvious one would be hendriklaubscher.com right? I thought about it and in general the personal domain thing is a bit too in your face for me. So after some research I decided on haimrich.com. It is the founding definition of my name, Hendrik. Just to be clear, it is not “ha im rich” which has been mentioned in various discussions. I hope this settles the naming of this domain.

Think about it, naming of companies are difficult. Get it right and your customers can remember your name. Get it wrong and you are just another ecommerce website.

The 10 e-commerce stories for the week ending 06 July 2012

The first week of July is in the record books. This year has steadily been gaining speed and everyone has started with Q4 planning. It is pretty clear to me that in South Africa ecommerce is starting to become more acceptable. I know that sounds weird but I still feel retailers see ecommerce as a challenge and not a complimentary channel to make further revenue. It made me smile reading that Mr Price and CNA will be adding more attention to their ecommerce offerings. Are we at a tipping point for ecommerce in South Africa?

I was overseas last week and when walking around in Turkey the retailers in the shopping malls had URLs and social media stickers on the windows of their shops. Bricks and Mortar is definitely in certain markets adding ecommerce to their touch points for customers. I hope you missed the weekly posts last week, the silence wont be happening again. So, without anymore babbling, here are the stories that got me to click and read more.

The 10 e-commerce stories for the week ending 22 June 2012

The past week my mind has been focused on curation based commerce (Fab.com, onekingslane.com) and the emerging rocket ship called Pinterest. I love Fab and their emails and think that curation based commerce is a vertical that will expand. (The only problem is that they need to scale internationally, cough South Africa.) Let me be frank for a minute, after looking at Pinterest for close to a month, and writing a post on the company; I am still not sure whether Pinterest has a use case. Pinterest – A bubble waiting to burst opens this weeks’ look back with regards to ecommerce news.

Pinterest – a bubble waiting to burst?

“There are a lot of people who think we’re in a bubble,” Andreessen said, “which makes me think we’re not. I hope everybody thinks we’re in a bubble, though, because it helps keep prices [for making equity investments] down.” Marc Andreessen in conversation with Kara Swisher

When I think of eCommerce, a few companies come to mind. The usual suspects with their multiple verticals are always on alert for new potential threats. Amazon, eBay and Alibaba are all on most shoppers minds and in most cases are habits. Habits are what all e-retailers want, a subconscious process and actions that lead to profits. Remember those articles related to purchases during intoxication, that grabbed the attention of anyone associated with eCommerce. It is a bit extreme but it makes my point.

Strategy is what drives the important players. Amazon always have a feel for what goes in their various verticals but if they cant compete with the market leader (which is not related to their holdings) then in most cases they buy the companies outright. Zappos is the example always mentioned as Jeff Bezos realised he needed to acquire them before any of his competitors do. In other cases Amazon have invested in companies (LivingSocial) and then created their own version of the business (AmazonLocal) in growing vertical. This is seen in verticals that are created at great speed by competitors (Groupon) and then a response is needed. I call these market responses and these companies in general either survive or die at a very quick rate. (For the record, LivingSocial has been an investment hog and headache for Amazon).

The 10 e-commerce stories for the week ending 15 June 2012

It is the end of the week and what a week it was. Monday Apple dazzled everyone with their product launches (iOS6 can be seen as a direct to Google, that is going to be a separate post soon) and then word came of the struggles of Nokia. Mobile commerce is something that I encounter on a daily basis, so these story lines are of importance.

Conference organizers, I have a simple request for you. As someone who is interested in some of the ecommerce conferences that happen all over the world. how about a single user rate to view some of the speakers? I love reading posts like Tim Kilroy’s in which he summarises IRCE 2012, but the missing context is an issue. So videos or livestreams would be beneficial. Please folks.. spread the knowledge.