The Facebook of ecommerce
That particular story is perfectly well written, but it’s read because it’s in that magazine and that magazine is bought because it’s on the rack, and now people don’t come to stories like that anymore. And equally, that particular product is bought because it was ranged and placed at eye level, and now it’s not going to be being bought like that either. Today, those stories get their traffic, very often, from Facebook ..
.. Amazon is great at selling you what’s on the table in the front of the bookshop, and at selling one copy a year of a million or so obscure titles, but it’s not very good at showing you what’s on the shelves at the back of the bookshop. It’s not so good at selling the mid-list – things that you didn’t know existed, or didn’t know you wanted, before you saw them. It does have a recommendation product, but it’s not clear how well it works, and indeed an interesting question for Amazon is how far it can grow before running into categories for which its commodity merchandising model doesn’t work so well.
.. we’ve now reached the point that it’s not clear that there is anything that cannot be bought online. But actually, the real barrier now is often not touching it, but knowing about it.
.. Without that, we’ll have more of the polarisation one can often see in ecommerce today, between bestsellers on one hand and the long tail on the other with the middle squeezed.
.. So, someone needs to do the demand generation – to tell you there’s something you might want.