Extreme Retailing: Change Is Coming to Online Shopping

Everything is suddenly possible again in the e-commerce world. In the US in particular, interest in extreme e-commerce models is rising steeply (“Are you ready for extreme retailing?”).

Joshua Goldman from Norwest Venture Partners gave a short introduction to Swooponomics at the Retail Innovation & Marketing Conference:

 

Parallel to that, several American innovators met at the First Round Capital E-commerce Summit.

The comments of the event organizer (“Change is coming to online shopping”)  corroborates much of what Exciting Commerce has been heralding since 2005 which was also self-evident at this year's Live Shopping Days Conference:

"One of the things that’s surprised me the most over the last decade is how little transformative innovation has occurred in ecommerce.

eBay looks pretty much the same as it did a decade ago.  Amazon looks pretty much the same as it did a decade ago.  While the top 10 sites on the Internet have changed dramatically over the last decade, the top 10 online shopping sites on the Internet have not.

The traditional catalog/cart shopping model remains pretty much unchanged.  I’m not sure of the reasons why so little innovation has occurred – perhaps it is because of Google.

Specifically, the fact that online retailers had a scalable, measurable, and predictable source of customer traffic (through both SEO and Adwords) might have reduced the external pressures to innovate.

However, the online shopping paradigm is finally changing.  Indeed, I think we’ve seen more innovation in the last 10 months than in the last 10 years. 

We’ve seen an explosion of interesting technologies and opportunities that seek to change online shopping"

The American innovators cover a wide range of methods and models from alternative payment systems down to game mechanics.

Related posts:

• Etsy 2010: How Social Can Commerce Get?
• American E-Commerce - The Times They Are A-Changin’
• Game Mechanics: Putting the Fun into Functional (Video)

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

Comments

[michael barton]

I agree. Change is coming to online shopping and its very overdue. There are a lot of new and innovative websites popping up everyday. Problem is it now takes a lot of cash to ever think about competing with websites like Amazon or Ebay. no matter how great a site may be for us, the consumer. Its nice for consumers to see sites using the 'reverse biding' model and other "lowest bid wins" type off models.

Great writing here
Thankyou