A few weeks ago, Microsoft announced that it would provide a new service called ‘Bing Deals’ that can find a nearby shops and connect to deals on Groupon and LivingSocial. This news shows us the trend of commerce rapidly moving from offline to online.
1. Expansion of Online Shopping
The expansion of online shopping became a clear phenomenon after Amazon and eBay have activated their own eCommerce market. Recently there have been some interesting technology which attracts a lot of service providers, NFC. Prior to NFC, smartphone users were already accustomed to the QR code -based commerce service. It means eCommerce can be expanded to the mobile commerce, called mCommerce. Maybe it would be possible to contribute to TV commerce which really is an expansion of eCommerce.
Convenience and cheap price are the main reasons that many customers used to buy products via the internet. And this trend is expected to increase for several years more.
2. Two Approaches to Shopping Sites
As you can see in the following diagram, there are two paths to access shopping sites, Direct and Indirect.
[ Value Chain of the Commerce Business ]
Direct path is driven by shopping sites that try to manage their own customer basis by sending an e-mail, advertizing and distributing their own mobile applications. On the other hand, Google and Facebook actively use their power of services such as the search engine and relation information. They pursue to enrich their original services by adding a useful and intelligent function. For the convenience, I will call it the commerce gateway.
3. Appearance of the Commerce Gateway
Google has launched Google Offers and Google Places while Microsoft recently has reported the new function of Bing Deals. Google is enthusiastically gethering shop owners by giving them a free and convenient marketing tool. This aggressive approach will empower the connection between customers and proprietors. Hotpot and NFC embedded service will be helpful to strengthen the initiative for Google in the near future.
Other players such as Microsoft and Facebook are little bit positive in making its own channel for the commerce business. They’ve just created the location based service and functionally developed the function gathering meta DB of allied service providers.
4. Conclusion
What would be the essentials for the differentiated commerce gateway? I think customization(or personalization) and intriguing participation would be the answer. For now, several experts argue that this connecting world is under the environment of information pollution. Picking out the right information is needed for both consumers and sellers.
Though we don’t know which path or which player is chosen as mainstream, we can be sure of that the hegemony of the commerce gateway would become important more than before.