One of the pleasant developments to observe in the last years has been the evolution of mass customization offerings. New players in this arena have been tending away from a pure tool provider model towards a model enhanced with community supported social shopping elements. Good examples are: Fabidoo and Shapeways with 3D printing, and the new versions of Shutterfly, Zazzle & Co.
Adam Michelson of Optaros has posted a few thoughts on the principles of how something essentially new can be derived from a combination of multiple trends ("Social shopping and Product Configuration to create The Long Tail"):
"It is nice when two trends can be mashed together to create a third. For example when you combine the trend in ecommerce to allow customers to create highly configurable products with the trend towards social shopping, together they create a third trend, the Long Tail."
Classical online merchants however, tend to have difficulty with configurable products if the necessary manufacturing processes haven’t been strategically planned for:
"The basic ecommerce engine is not good at this type of lightweight manufacturing, as these features are usually evaluated by the retailer as a combination of allowing customization options, such as monogramming, or kitting/bundling.
Ecommerce engines will fail here because lightweight manufacturing is not a customization or kitting capability, it is a lightweight manufacturing capability.
However once a retailer does successfully add a lightweight manufacturing capability to their ecommerce expertise, it can be a distinct competitive advantage."
It’s a very worthwhile read with thought-provoking points on how “out of the box” thinking could be valuable for retailers.
Just one dissenting opinion on the last paragraph (“One final thought"). While Adam argues that new trends should be evaluated with respect to how they can be merged into your existing e-commerce strategy, this type of thinking often proves to be difficult. Indeed, only too often do established companies attempt to remold and squeeze new developments into their existing strategies without giving sufficient thought to what the underlying success factors are. I suggest to enjoy Adam’s article with that caveat in mind.
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Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, translated by Jason Soo.
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