The Amazon WebStore and the Shopping System of the Future

This is a further post for our loose series on “Shopping Systems of the Future”.

While the next e-commerce generation has long been hoping for new and more sales oriented shopping systems, in the classical warehouse oriented e-commerce world, Amazon is still the ultimate role model for online trade.

It should be then good news now for online and catalog-based shops. Amazon is currently testing a new webstore which will offer many of the Amazon shop functionalities to smaller merchants:

"Shake hands with the leader in ecommerce innovation, and succeed in your ecommerce endeavors."

The current shop systems from Amazon and similar marketplaces are slowly but surely reaching the limits of their conceptional extendibility and have therefore (according to our estimates) a rather short half-life. There is also the valid hope that via Magento and similar efforts, a new generation of solutions will rise over the next years offering e-commerce companies the same potential which nowadays still require custom development efforts.

How will (or must) shopping solutions look like in the next 5 to 10 years?

A few related posts related to this question:

• Extreme Retailing: Change Is Coming to Online Shopping
• Swiss E-commerce Study: Leading Shops Prefer Custom Built Systems
• TheBakery: How Intershop Wants To Lead the Trade Revolution
• Shopping Systems with a Future: Product Clouds on the Horizon?
• The Shopping System of the Future – Starring: Google, Paypal and Amazon

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

Comments

[Robin]

I read this article that includes Amazon WebStore with a lot of interest. I have a bit of news your readers can use.

The (beta) Amazon WebStore is the best option I can find for my online store, but the documentation is extremely confusing. When I realized I was going to have to figure out everything about the Amazon WebStore by myself, I just went ahead and wrote up what I learned in a helpful organized way, so that others wouldn’t have to suffer (I'm a writer). The "Tutorial Guide to the (beta) Amazon WebStore" is totally free. Your readers can download a 57-page pdf, or read the the Guide, at http://www.webstoreguide.info.