Electric Thoughts in a Digital Era

Category: eCommerce

  • Amazon doing an FBA pilot

    Earlier today a reader contacted me with some very interesting information on a pilot that Amazon is testing currently. The contents of the communicated has been redacted to protect the identity of the source but a few things are clear to me.

    One – Prime is becoming more important for Amazon to combat the impact that Google will have on their business and bottom line. Being able to provide a standard Amazon experience to all shoppers and then leverage Prime to enable more transactions just highlight just how valuable Prime is for the Seattle company. Amazon Prime is the worlds greatest loyalty program.

    When Bezos and co create a revenue generation opportunity via a new investment or feature it is to be leveraged multiple times to recoup that investment. This very factor makes me realise just how far Amazon is in front of their competition. Think of it as Lean Startup meets Walmart.

    (more…)

  • Thoughts on SA e-commerce

    I have had 2 articles on my mind that has lead to a few thoughts on the state of South African ecommerce. Paul Galatis wrote a very interesting analysis on why ecommerce in our country is lagging and then Andrew Lynch asked out loud what is wrong with ecommerce in South Africa? Paul and Andrew are both entrepreneurs in the ecommerce space in South Africa thus the articles hit home for me and it lead to this post.

    Paul mentions that the reason why we are behind is not due to the normal factors mentioned in conversations over coffee etc. Instead, it is due to retailers not paying enough to ecommerce and thus not executing it to the masses.

    We’ve all heard the arguments and many of us have used them repeatedly: South Africans are nervous to use their credit cards online; internet speeds are slow; the postal service is unreliable; we don’t trust that our orders will actually arrive; we still want to touch and feel products before we buy them; and that South Africans shop differently to people in the rest of the world. I used to tell that story but now I have a different idea.

    I have been in the ecommerce space for close to 5 years and can unequivocally state that the industry has moved forward. There are many more ecommerce businesses in the country now that what was the norm back in the early 2000’s. The growth is seen in the fact that almost every retail category (home goods, electronics, pharmacy, clothing, wine etc) are now represented by an online business that competes with the physical retailer we all are accustomed to visit. Payment gateways have doubled in providing prospective entrepreneurs with options to process credit cards. So, what is the matter and why are we always asking about the state of the ecommerce industry?

    Continue Reading

  • Amazon goes grocery shopping outside Seattle

    Jeff Bezos must be the pied piper of commerce. His creation Amazon is slowly moving out of its traditional market (online) and disrupting retail. He clearly wants to ensure that Amazon can supply any product to any shopper in the US. (International focus is to intensify in the next 5 years in my opinion as current countries of operation become saturated)

    The onslaught into retail and the high street started with the Amazon Price Check app. The idea was to enable shoppers to scan and compare products and then buy through Amazon at a discount.  In this specific case Bezos used the shopper as an intelligence network that would enable Amazon to create pricing data for retailer product.  It is telling that this happened in 2011 and if one looks back it was the beginning of their challenge to retailers in the US.

    On Dec. 10, Amazon promoted a new “Price Check” mobile phone app by offering shoppers a 5% discount—valid only for that one day—on items they found in brick-and-mortar stores, but purchased online through Amazon instead. The app enables in-store shoppers to scan or snap a photo of a product. It then immediately compares prices with Amazon’s. The app is prompting an outcry from small retailers, who say the site is using their independent stores as its own showroom.

    “The goal of the Price Check app is to make it as easy as possible for customers to access product information, pricing information, and customer reviews, just as they would on the Web, while shopping in a major retail chain store,” he said.

    Continue Reading

  • Ecommerce building blocks – articles to read and bookmark

    The silence is done, my month of  absence from writing has been spent researching and working on some really exciting blogposts for the coming months. Normal service will now be returning.  You will notice that my website has had some changes done – I will be writing a post on that in the future as I am not completed with the transformation, yet.

    CPCStrategy whom also has had a huge change in terms of the look and feel of their website recently wrote a cheeky article on the The 5 Best Ecommerce Articles In The History Of The Internet. Let me be honest for a moment, these articles and videos are some of the better content found on ecommerce but it points a very limited picture of the ecosystem.

    In terms of a solution I thought about doing a top 10 of e-commerce posts. (These are my favorite posts written by some of the sharpest minds in the industry. Also note that I am going to post them in no particular order as the content should be read, bookmarked and returned to. That for me is the mark of good content.
    Continue Reading

  • The Fab.com refocus

    Curated ecommerce is a hot topic. Call it a new wave of commerce businesses or just a new vertical that has gained a lot of momentum over the last 6 months. The Gilt Groupe started it after Vente-privee mastered flash sales.It is full priced online retail with a focus on apparel and white goods.

    Just to be clear flash sales is not the same thing as curated commerce. Flash sales boils down to selling high value merchandise at deeply discounted  price. Flash sales is an industry that I keep an eye on as I believe it is a good measure of where apparel online retail is at.  Curated commerce is ecommerce with a editorial angle to it (beautiful images, content that is more related to the person buying the item) .

    Flash sale businesses have steadily been pivoting to full price commerce as the flash sales businesses is in the decline in mature markets (Ventee-Privee and Markafoni being the exception to the general trend) . Flash sales also faced stern competition for attention and inbox space from daily deals (Groupon, LivingSocial). Ultimately companies who are succeeding in ecommerce are those who have built deep relationships with their customers based on being customer centric, logistics focused and ensuring that joy is created post transaction.

    Enter the upstart

    I have been following the journey of Fab.com pretty closely as I believe that they are part of a new wave of ecommerce businesses. Jason Goldberg is someone I deeply respect as he is transparent (his blog is a must read for any one in ecommerce) but they are like Amazon as they fret the little stuff. The business is unique and making lots of noise and have gone through a variety of pivots. Pivot has a serious misdirection in this case as Goldberg and co-founder Bradford Shellhammer have refocused their business 5 times. The 5th being the most ambitious I have seen from a startup (more on that later).

    Continue Reading