Black Friday stories, Tiger Direct consolidates, A virtual measuring tape, E-commerce industry insights from Turkey, India, South Africa and Brazil.
What a week, that is the first thing that I can think of when reflecting about the last 5 working days. Today is Black Friday in the United States and my inbox looks in pretty bad shape, the intensity of this years marketing by eretailers feels to have gone up a notch. Black Friday made in appearance in South Africa as eretailers try to get on the bandwagon (Expect a post on this topic in the coming days) of a phenomenal day for retail in the US.
Amazon this week did something I was expecting. It threw down the gauntlet to Google with a very clever concept called Amazon pages. It is a Pinterest like execution designed to draw more content around Amazon’s rubik’s cube. Bezos in my opinion never does anything for free and there is always a strategy around everything done by Amazon.com. The pages concept to me feels like a challenge to Google as this product will have content that is not found in the Google index. This topic is going to be one that is to be revisited as Amazon is in a mode I have never seen before. Bezos has been calculated and slowly making moves in publishing, advertising and technology; the difference is that this is being managed by Amazon with how much is shown to the world controlled by them.
E-commerce in developing nations is pretty close to home for me. I live in a developing economy, have it as my occupation and it is something I am pretty interested in. The next phase of ecommerce in my mind is a shift towards new battle grounds which will see the eBays, Amazons of the developed ecommerce markets going into regions where a Buscape, MercadoLibre, Alibaba, Flipkart, Souq, Trendyol or Ozon is found. In my mind platforms, resources and execution is going to be what determines who survives..