The differences among online shopping stores should go beyond the products they sell; creatively, Net marketers have got to do better than the status quo.
[+] A drought of creativity
ECommerce in Taiwan has undergone several rounds of ups and downs. As early as 1997, the first batch of eCommerce pioneers had come in. By 1999, the height of Internet boom, casualties were already appearing. But as those fatally wounded were removed from the battlefield, new comers seemed undaunted. With blind bravery, they were burned by Internet bubble burst in 2000.
Those who survived the first two rounds of elimination got a first taste of profits as late as 2003. This success prompted the emergence of the third wave of entrepreneurs, mostly fighting alone, whose undaunted march toward profits has ultimately led them into the quagmire of price competition starting 2005 when market saturation has become a fact of life.
For these virtual shop owners, eCommerce is but an additional channel through which to sell stuff. In this sense, there is no difference whatsoever between a virtual shop and a shop you can bring your shopping bag to. That is, an online store is as much a store in its own right as its bricks-and-mortar cousins. Therefore, there is no reason why whatever works for real stores can't be applied to online shops.
That explains why we never fail to see online shopping store system solution providers have the shelf management system, shopping cart system, online payment system and membership management system packaged part and parcel and sold to online store website wannabes.
Besides perhaps some discrepancies in layout and artistic designs, there is no way to tell one online store website from another. That could be good news for consumers who do not wish to learn to navigate a new website every time one comes up as they all feature the same functions. However, this rutted development somehow hit me as a huge drag.
That is, since when have we lost the courage to venture, to innovate and to let ourselves get lost in the wild wild net ? Those are the spirits that have made Internet undertakings great and intriguing. Without them, Internet is reduced to what it really is: nil. And the reduction began when people stopped conjuring up ways to redefine Internet and taking whatever handed to them/served up to them instead.
[+] Those were the good old days
If you call what I am doing being cynical, I have a good reason keeping it up. Back in 1999, there were two eCommerce websites taking Taiwan by storm. One of them was pAsia Inc.'s CoolBid (invested by Intel then), whose two modes of doing business over Internet have had me impressed until this day.
One of these two methods, whose name has slipped my mind, featured constant updating of prices at the interval of a few seconds/minutes. That is, the price of a given product oscillates within a range instead of sitting still.
This feature made it possible for buyers to lie in wait and lunge out of ambush when the screen flashed the one price that he/she could not say no to. You could see people constant going for a product but you could not see what price they got it for. In other words, every body believed he/she got the best deal.
While some might find this way of going about purchasing too much of a torture and preferred a set price, others found it a good thrill. After all, shopping on the Net is constantly hitting new lows in the category of boredom. It never hurt anybody to complicate things/derail a little.
Another memorable mode of online transaction was known as "group haggling," which was in concept similar to the "group buying" that is currently all the rage on BBS sites, only that the former was more automated. That is, with group haggling, one got to see a curve chart that indicated change in prices as number of people bidding for a product changed. A product got increasingly cheaper when more people wanted it and bought it.
What these two measures had in common was that they posted a dire challenge to website operators as with a pricing management system that had prices floats, online stores, things got a lot more complicated, especially when they sourced products from a number of suppliers.
[+] Lessons from the past
While these bizarre ways of doing business on the Net has emerged as early as 1999, an US company called Priceline.com beat them in eccentricity at an even earlier time when it had consumers make an offer and then on behalf of consumers took the offer to the sellers to see if it is OK.
The advent of the Internet age, back then, came with the prevalent perception that increased transparency of information will be conducive to trickle-down of power, thereby giving rise to a new breed of consumers who would wield tremendous power to negotiate for themselves better price. This indeed has happened now that most eCommerce companies are trapped in endless price comparison on the part of consumers.
Back then, people had seen it coming. They had thus created a way of shopping that better matched the spirit of Internet than today. The patented way of shopping as has lived on priceline.com paid more homage to consumers' free will and served as a better embodiment of what Internet is all about.
In the physical world, rounding up a bunch of people of the same shopping mind to form a unified front against sellers would be a much more daunting job. In the virtual world of Internet, however, the spatial boundaries are much more easily crossed, making it possible for consumers to negotiate as a team.
These old memories hit me again when I saw news reports of how "Group Buying" has taken BBS sites by storm recently. These old eCommerce attempts might succeed as much as they might fail, but the bottom line is that these attempts, as a genuine collective quest for the underlying character of Internet, fell nothing short of spectacular.
I wonder if anyone is still making attempts of this sort out there. What makes shopping fun (on- or off-line)? What makes the Internet stand out? What new services should have been offered and have not? These are the questions that should be on the mind of all of us.
2005/08/08 - By Digitalwall.com - Way to
China Internet/Telecom )
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