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The future of ecommerce, Flipkart to be Largely an M-Commerce Company, Tiger Global snaps up Alibaba shares at a giant valuation, Argentina and Russia restricts ecommerce and much more.

The past week has contained stories that has me shaking my head in disbelief (Argentina and Russia restricting ecommerce) and thinking about the future of ecommerce. What is the future of ecommerce? The short answer is I am not sure. I see a combination of mobile commerce with personalization, location based services that includes social commerce in some way or form all together. Social commerce has been on my mind for the last few weeks as I think Asia is showing everyone that messaging is also part of the future. I will continue the thoughts in a longer post on social commerce soon..

I am going to be a bit controversial in a minute as I think ecommerce in Argentina and Russia got given the short end this past week. Long story short in both cases have legislation ensured that importing of international goods from international merchants (eBay, Amazon and Alibaba) become a long and difficult process. I believe that in both countries are the incumbents (MercadoLibre and Ozon) benefiting from this sudden change but in both counts the biggest losers are the locals buying from these international juggernauts. I have a fundamental problem when corporates use legislation to slow down the progress of companies that innovate and do better customer service than local companies. This development surely will hurt Russia’s position as an emerging market that ecommerce investors are looking at.

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Amazon to enter Korea?, Apple opens a Tmall store, LivingSocial’s CEO is out, Google to unveil a new flight comparison service in Europe and much more.

Readers, normal service will now return as the news in the ecommerce space is back to normality. I did not want to write a post in the second week of year as the news section was a bit bare.

If you look at my highlighted stories above you will notice that the stories focus on a trend that I believe we will see a lot of in 2014 – the move to global brands in ecommerce. Amazon is moving into new markets, Apple has opened a store on Tmall and the move towards global ecommerce brands continues. It is clear to me that currently there is a land grab battle going on between the big international ecommerce businesses and the battles are all happening either behind closed doors (funding rounds) or in the public domain (new markets that are being entered).  Add to this the pending IPO of Alibaba, then one can conclude that we are in for an interesting year.

Something else, that I am beginning to see in a variety of markets is consolidation. This is a natural by product of market maturation for me or it could be a case of new businesses looking to become big players in a market. A prime example of this is Groupon, the company that just never wants to become quiet. They have been investing and buying heavily in a wide variety of businesses. Their acquisition of ideeli is a simple case of a distressed platform that needed a buyer. Add to that the acquisition of Ticket Monster then you realise that Groupon is going to be around for a long time. Where does leave LivingSocial?

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Amazon to reach $100 billion in 2014?, Car buying revolutionized, Price Machine Offers Unbiased Shopping Insight, E-retailers join the marketplace race and much more.

It is the first week of 2014 in the record books, the week contained some references to issues experienced over the festive season by Amazon etc but in terms of news it was a slow week. Call it the calm before the storm (the year) or just that most businesses were either closed or running skeleton staff.

I think the coming year is going to contain a theme that will most probably be getting a lot of attention by the big ecommerce businesses, logistics. If Amazon and eBay really want to disrupt retail as they claim then they will need to invest into logistics. Call me crazy, but I think there is a lot more behind Amazon’s partnership with USPS than what people are talking about.. For Amazon to grow and become completely dominant in the US they will need to own the last mile in terms of delivery. UPS, I suspect will be doing a lot more planning for festive 2014 than that was seen in last few weeks of 2013.

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UPS fails to deliver, Jingdong has 16 billion reasons to celebrate 2013, the hidden side of ecommerce returns, Alipay flexes its financial muscles, Line partners with Rakuten’s Tarad.com and much more

The festive season is over and one company got badly burnt by the bad weather and lateness of orders – UPS. UPS has been getting quite a bit of press over their inability to deliver all Christmas packages by Christmas day. A few things need to be kept in mind – global economics ensured that customers shopped until the last minute for Christmas in the hope of better deals. Amazon gained a million customers for their Prime membership which I am guessing leads to 20 million customers paying for expedited shopping. I cant believe that UPS did not plan for this – in actual fact I think the last minute shopping lead to a surge in packages that nobody took into consideration.

UPS ships 40% of Amazon’s deliveries annually but I wonder whether this issue will lead to a strained relationship in 2014? The one company that gained from UPS’s misfortune – Target.

The biggest winner in the Christmas gift shipping debacle? Target whose security breach is no longer The Big Retail Story.

— Sucharita Mulpuru (@smulpuru) December 27, 2013

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