Electric Thoughts in a Digital Era

Category: eCommerce

  • Best Buy Launches Its Own Marketplace

    The Marketplace concept is one that both intrigues me but it also scares the living daylights out of me. Call it an oxymoron but its greatest strength could be it biggest challenge. Let me explain.

    So yesterday when Best Buy announced that is adding a marketplace to its offering..  The first problem that this creates for me is that this is not a unique offering. There are many other online retailers that does it and while it provides additional content to your offering for the long tail it may cause harm.

    Best Buy is following Amazon.com, eBay, Mastercard, Sears, Walmart and others in opening an online marketplace that gives consumers access to products from other merchants in addition to its own. According to a Financial Times report, Best Buy is responding to the development of its unintended role as “Amazon’s showroom”, the situation where consumers visit the chain’s stores with smartphones to comparison shop and eventually make their purchases online. CEO Brian Dunn, in a statement, called the Best Buy Marketplace “a key development to our multi-channel platform … that enables consumers to shop how they want and encourages additional reasons to visit and purchase at BestBuy.com.” ANT Online, BeachAudio.com, Buy.com, Mambate, SF Planet and Wayfair are third-party sellers that are participating in the launch of the Best Buy Marketplace.

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  • @WalmartLabs – The big retailer moves into digital

    Walmart is the biggest retailer in the world and arguable the most controversial. Labor disputes and being in the news not for financial results seems to happen fairly often.

    Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., (NYSE: WMT) serves customers and members more than 200 million times per week at more than 9,600 retail units under 69 different banners in 28 countries. With fiscal year 2011 sales of $419 billion, Walmart employs more than two million associates worldwide. Walmart continues to be a leader in sustainability, corporate philanthropy and employment opportunity.

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  • Decide.com helping stop buyers regret

    I have also decided to also mention some online products or startups that I think that are going places. For the record I am not an investor nor am I affiliated to any of these companies.

    The first one I am going to mention is Decide.com.

    Backed by science, not marketing.

    Decide is all about leveraging data and technology, not marketing ploys, to help shoppers. We use our patent-pending machine learning and text mining algorithms on billions of price points across millions of products, blog posts, and articles on the web to enable shoppers to make the best buying decision possible.

    As I love gadgets, I often find myself wondering if I am in a retail store (yes, I do go the bricks and mortar shops) if I am getting the best deal. With the emergence of mobile apps and mobi sites , the shopper can get the final piece of information to make a purchase decision. Decide takes this a step further and do price predictions to ensure that you buy the latest version and am not getting ripped off.

    Don’t get burned on price.

    Price predictions help you pull the trigger with confidence and save money. Our prediction algorithms utilize billions of observed price movements and over 40 distinct factors.

    I think this startup is heading into a space which could be beneficial to entire eCommerce industry. Giving the user more ammunition that the price is right and that there is not a new model on the way soon is trust building factors, that cannot easily be done in the current online shopping experience. As soon as they add more categories (only cameras, LCD TV’s and  notebooks) then I think they could become an acquisition target.

  • eCommerce Stigmas Which Hurt The South African Industry

    I shop online often and it is my occupation but I feel certain stigmas hurt the industry, especially in South Africa. Some of them have grounds and others are urban legends in my opinion.

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  • The return of the giant called eBay

    When I see the words eBay in my mind the first thought that comes to mind is the marketplace concept in which users can list their second hand goods in either a “buy-now” or auction environment.  It was the element that placed eBay on the map and subsequently provided a launch pad for them to raise capital to buy shopping.com (comparison shopping engine), paypal.com (payment gateway) and stubhub.com (live event ticketing platform).

    Many people are not aware that eBay is also in the classifieds space through their Kijiji group who have the popular South African classified provider Gumtree in their stable. The point that I am trying to make is that they have a multi-channel platform to capitalise on the entire eCommerce value chain.

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