Published on Tuesday, December 28 2010
Last week I participated in two roundtable discussions at the PluggedIn Ventures Summit on Ecommerce.(There were lots of interesting tweets during the summit – search for the #pisummit hashtag). When the issue of Facebook for commerce (or F-Commerce) came up on the Social Commerce panel, I pointed to JC Penney’s new Facebook app store as an example of what’s wrong with F-Commerce. In this post I’ll expand a bit more on why I think that’s the case, and what that means to retailers looking to understand how Facebook fits broadly into their multi-channel strategy.
During the initial roundtable of the day, the discussion turned to Facebook, and its role as the new portal:
While I can understand the impulse to draw parallels between the role AOL held for many (especially media) companies in the early days of the (commercial) internet, I think we’ve got to be careful to not miss the lesson the portals never properly learned: on the web, everything else is always one click (or one tab, or one window) away.
In other words, Facebook may be the new portal, but does the concept of a portal even make sense in a world of multi-tabbed browsers, multi-tasking users, and multi-device access? If there ever was a world in which a portal could truly be the user’s starting point and the window through which that user viewed everything on the web (already a questionable claim), that day has long passed. Many web users spend significant amounts of time “on” or “in” Facebook, true, but what else are they doing at the same time?
The question becomes more than just academic when you come at it as a large scale retailer trying to create a strategy for Facebook.
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Published on Wednesday, October 6 2010
Email Invite from Sears.com
When I got the above email from Sears inviting me into a new social shopping experience, I hoped that they’d found a way to combine MySears and Sears.com together more contextually and pervasively, letting me move easily between the “get advice before you buy” approach of MySears.com (with its action verbs being join, explore, and connect) and the shopping focused Sears.com.
They haven’t, but what they have done is introduce more social functionality into the shop. Visit sears.com and in the utility navigation right underneath the multi-brand bar (Sears, Kmart, Crafstman, Kenmore, Lands End, etc) you should see an option which toggles between “visit our social site” and “leave our social site.” Clicking on “visit our social site” and you’re greated with this splash screen explaining the new experience:
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Published on Monday, October 4 2010
Trip Advisor's new invite-only travel offering
TripAdvisor is joining Jetsetter, Kayak, and TabletHotels (good summary here) to offer a private sales site for hotel accommodations with the interestingly named “snique.” (I realize they’re going for “sneak,” as in “sneak away on a trip” – but I can’t help but read it as a contraction of “is unique?” or a “snick” as in snicker).
Can TripAdvisor’s brand support the claim of exclusivity? I think we all know at this point that the “invite only” exclusivity of private-sales sites is really about promoting an image rather than keeping out the unwashed masses. If I got invited, as someone who’s rarely if ever really used TripAdvisor (despite travelling frequently), everyone is getting invited.
Clicking through the email invite (above) results in this signup screen:
Snique's Sign Up Options
I like the idea of offering Facebook based signup, though when I tried it all I got was a cryptic error:
Not a very useful error message
Also, given that this is an exclusive, invite-only, member drive site – shouldn’t they already know my email address, name, zip, etc? They knew that at TripAdvisor, in order to be able to send me the invite.
Doesn’t feel very exclusive to fill out such a sign up form. Ultimately, though, the proof of value will be in the deals – let’s see if they justify the brand.
Published on Monday, September 27 2010
Photo by Chris Harrison - http://www.flickr.com/photos/cdharrison/4992493250/
Got an email in late August that Square, the iPhone mobile card reader / payment acceptance application founded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, had begun shipping readers again.
Mine came this week – 2 of them actually. I’m pretty certain I only ordered one, so I’m not sure where the other one came from – both had the same address and name on them.
Square’s going to have a huge impact on independent vendors: artists who sell at street fairs, bands selling merchandize at shows, stalls at farmer’s markets, etc. The mobile application is free, the reader is free, and Square takes only 2.75% plus $0.15 per transaction when the card is present and swiped. I can even see this approach getting used in more traditional settings (think high end retail stores) in order to free the staff from the old point of sale terminal. (Not sure if Square will offer better percent-of-transaction terms to enterprises who do a certain volume once the rush of free accounts settles down, but I would if I were them).
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Darius Razgaitis
John Eckman
