Why is e-commerce such a hot area in venture capital now? from Elizabeth Knopf of Sorced.
Comprehensive Review of the Current State of eCommerce
January 8, 2012
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Posted by Brian Smith
Reading
December 22, 2011While I just started a new book, I found myself spending a lot of time this week on two articles and all the related comments, posts, counter-arguments, etc.:
-Marc Andreessen: Predictions for 2012 (and beyond) – From CNET. Yes, I still check out news.com, although not as much as I once did. The article is a follow up to Andreesen’s WSJ article from August about Why Software Is Eating The World. I had a bit of a problem with a statement I thought he was making that because of smartphones “we saw the rise of a whole category of e-commerce category killers in verticals that 5 or 10 years ago couldn’t support high growth companies because the markets weren’t big enough,” but I’m probably just reading the article wrong. In any case, Software is Eating the World. He makes the great, albeit obvious case for why we’ll see more verticals eaten by software in the coming years. 6 billion smartphones in the next 3-5yrs. Wow.
-CEO of Forrester Research, George Colony put forth the thesis that the Web is Dead during his talk at Le Web (see above video). Fred Wilson picked up on it. And Mark Suster said ‘don’t bet on it.” Great to have George Colony put out something different and hear Suster walk through software development over the past 30 years in his criticism.
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Posted by Brian Smith
Ecommerce Integration With Facebook
November 30, 2011A couple days ago, Techcrunch had a post with two points people found interesting.
Point #1 was the focus of the article: “50% of visitors to ecommerce sites are currently logged in to Facebook.”
Point #2 was a soundbite from Facebook: “88% of Internet Retailer Top 200 retail sites are integrated with Facebook.”
I threw out Point #1 as normal Techcrunch drivel as the article could have said 50% of visitors to health sites, porn sites, banking sites, news sites, or travel sites are currently logged in to Facebook. We all know visitors to any sites are currently logged into Facebook. It’s becoming unusual for people to log out of Facebook. What retailers – and health sites, porn sites, travel sites, etc. – need to think about, though, is why their visitors aren’t logged into their own sites.
I’ve always thought that the holy marketing grail for ecommerce sites wasn’t PPC or SEO (or to a lesser degree, Display/Retargetting, Social, Affiliate Programs, Lead Gen, etc.) but rather the in-house email list and the retention and engagement that comes along with the people on that list. You have names, purchase history, interests, demographic information like age, gender, income, and address, and much more. Slicing and dicing this information (and using big words like Business Intelligence) allows you to intelligently build a lifetime relationship with your customers.
But unfortunately, all that powerful data about your customers is often overlooked in deference to that next acquisition through Google AdWords. In this way, merchants aren’t typically developing a relationship with their customers. They acquire visitors, try to get them to become customers, and then send them a coupon every once in a while or a holiday promo. And that’s about it. The utopian land of really engaging with customers to build a life long relationship (read LTV) doesn’t exist for traditional ecommerce sites. Yes, that’s a bit of a generalization, but think of how many people you have in marketing dedicated to acquisition compared to how many people dedicated to building a relationship with your customers.
But now, my opinions of email have changed. Email should be a part of everyone’s engagement strategy, but email kind of just sucks. I’ve been heavily influenced over the last year living in the land of everything social through my work with Kontagent, being a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, where local/mobile/social is hot hot hot, and understanding that kids these days just don’t use email…and I’m pretty sure that’s where adults are moving to as well. So if email isn’t where it’s at, where is it at? Well, as the Techcrunch article says, 50% of your users are logged into Facebook. They’re posting on friends’ walls, messaging, and playing games. Your customers are using their mobile phones to text, chat, and use lots of apps.
Another email is not going to cut through the clutter, but more importantly, it’s just not going to be the way to communicate in the future.
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted by Brian Smith
Blog Down. Blog Up.
November 18, 2011The domain ComparisonEngines.com has been down for a couple weeks. Sorry about that. You could access the content at comparisonengines.wordpress.com, but no one knew that. Anyways, back up. Email is another issue. If you need to get in touch, you can temporarily use brian at brismi dot com. Thanks.
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Posted by Brian Smith
summer in the city – consulting
July 18, 2011back from my european adventures. england, france, spain, italy, germany, czech republic, hungary, denmark, sweeden (well, the airport), and iceland. very ww2 and cold war history focused trip. visiting the beaches of normandy, going behind the iron curtain, touching the berlin wall, and seeing a quasi-capitalistic budapest was a dream come true.
consulting for kontagent, helping them attack new verticals with their powerful social analytics platform…or what i’m starting to understand as analytics 2.0. it’s about user centric data. understanding interactions, determining influencers, and getting to the bottom of what really works and what really doesn’t (there are a lot of holes in current analytics solutions). more to come. impressive team, cutting edge product, and a big market.
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Posted by Brian Smith
Vendio Services, Inc. Acquires SingleFeed
June 28, 2011
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Posted by Brian Smith
where in the world is brian?
May 12, 2011i’m in europe.
have been in london for the last month. now off to northern france for a couple days (cherbourg-octeville, dday beaches, caen – thanks e!) before heading to paris (recommendations very welcome!). from there, i’m off to spain for a week (barcelona & san sebastian – thanks m!) before returning to france to visit a friend around nice (thanks b!). then making my way over to florence, italy (via the coast – portofino, cinque terre, etc.).
well rested. doing consulting work for an impressive social analytics company. be back soon. miss writing…and so much happening in the ecommerce space.
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Posted by Brian Smith
My Intelligent Shopping Agent – Part 3
March 11, 2011Read Part 1 and Part 2 before reading this post.
By now you can understand how your intelligent shopping agent will get its data. You can hopefully also imagine its predictive technology, anticipating what you want, when you want it, and where you should buy it, well before you even need it.
OK, there are many other features of this intelligent agent, but I just want to focus on one more, the purchase process, before tying this together with some ideas of the business model.
Your intelligent agent will have your payment information and permission to automatically make purchases. If you’re not comfortable with that, there will be an option to opt-out of this automation, but it’ll be an opt-out; the general user of the agent will trust it because of how well it knows you.
Your agent will know your buying habits and be hooked up to your bank and credit card accounts, so it will know what you can spend on a purchase. But this doesn’t mean it will willy-nilly spend whatever to get a product for you. That’s unacceptable. Your agent will haggle on your behalf. CUC International (now Cendant Corporation) owns a patent for Hagglezone and once had a site which featured the haggling technology. Read this NYTimes article (which even mentions Mercata.com – oh, the good old days of ecommerce!) from 2000 on how this worked. Merchants aren’t currently setup to haggle, but merchants could be part of the intelligent agent preferred marketplace powered by the haggling technology. While your intelligent shopping agent will always scour the web for the best deal and could have hooks into distributors and manufacturers, it could feature a marketplace (just like the old www.hagglezone.com) with select merchants who want to be part of this bazaar and get first crack at the consumers. In the Hagglezone, your agent could always just set an offer price and wait – as it will know the urgency of your need, it doesn’t need to transact immediately. And if the agent is working for thousands or tens of thousands of consumers, it could haggle or negotiate a great group buying price (back to the Mercata model).
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Posted by Brian Smith
My Intelligent Shopping Agent – Part 2 (Indicators!)
March 4, 2011So in my last post, I re-introduced the concept of my intelligent shopping agent. The foundation for the agent could be built by querying the consumer and analyzing past buying behavior. But that’s just the start. The focus of this post will be indicators (beacons?) which provide a deeper lever of understanding into a consumer’s tastes, and thus can start to intelligently make recommendations. That’s part of the point of the agent. It should always be on the lookout for potential products, deals, offers, sales, new trends, and more which might interest you.
Indicators:
-Search. This is a pretty easy one to understand. If you search for ‘red cashmere sweater’ or ‘cuisinart blender’ it makes sense that you might be interesting in acquiring those products. The intelligent agent will start to learn about brands or products that you’re interested in by these simple queries. But the value of search for the agent doesn’t end there. Search queries can make up a very complete picture of your life. We don’t typically think about this on a daily basis, but privacy advocates obviously do. Through my searches, the agent can figure out my socioeconomic status (Wealth. Am I searching for high end goods or coupons? Education. Am I searching for worldly issues or more pedestrian facts and figures? Occupation. Am I searching for computer courses or fundraising tactics?) It can determine my life stage (Am I searching for mortgages? Am I searching for a wedding planner? Am I searching for a SAT prep course? Am I searching for the AARP? Am I searching for income comparisons between two different cities?). There are some generalizations in there, but the idea that your searches can tell a lot about you and who you are today or who you’ll become tomorrow can be pretty powerful, especially when combined with other indicators. Interesting to note that Facebook doesn’t have complete search information.
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Posted by Brian Smith
My Intelligent Shopping Agent – Part 1
March 3, 2011I’m still waiting for my intelligent shopping agent, but alas, it’s still nowhere to be found.
Back in 2006, I wrote the following description of the system that I thought would be prevalent by now:
In my vision of the shopping (and a lot of other activities) in the future, I will have an intelligent agent which understands my preferences, knows the marketplace (price trends, consumer sentiment, etc.) and is always on the lookout for products, deals, reviews, recommendations from friends (this is where social networks/communities become really valuable), etc. which I’d be interested in. My agent understands the competitive landscape and makes sure that my buying decision is well informed. My agent would have the authority to haggle with a dealer/distributor/merchant and make purchases according to criteria that I set or that my agent learned over time. It might take a while for the agent to understand my preferences and there would definitely be work involved with setting up such a system, but we will get there.
That was over 4 years ago. While this system might sound like science fiction (Snowcrash – if you want to know what will happen in the future, read the leading scifi writers), we have the platforms to enable this reality. There are a number of components that can come together through powerful APIs, but why not start with just querying users about simple preferences in a creative way.
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Posted by Brian Smith
