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A World of Shopkeepers
By Frank Fiore
I love movies.
As a kid, I would spend almost every Saturday afternoon at the movie theater taking in the double feature. Yes, Virginia, you got TWO movies for the price of your ticket back then – but I’m dating myself. At any rate, I spent so much time in my developing years sitting in the dark that my mom wondered if I’d grow up to be a man or a mushroom!
Anyway, I digress. Neing a guy, I enjoy action flicks. One of my favorites is ‘Demolition Man’. The action takes place in the future in the city of San Angeles (San Diego and LA grew into each other and combined after the ‘Big One’).
After Sly Stallone saves the life of the Grand Poohbah, or whatever he is, he and Sandra Bullock – ‘Oh still my heart!’ - are invited to dinner as a reward. When they’re told that dinner would be at Taco Bell, Ms. Bullock coos, claps her hands and says “Goodie! Goodie! Taco Bell!” Both Stallone and the viewer are puzzled by her response until we’re told that Taco Bell was the winner of the Great Franchising Wars of the early 21st Century.
Sort of reminds me of the Internet today.
“Huh” you say? Let me explain.
Someday, in the early part of the 21st Century, the e-commerce landscape will either contain tens of thousands - make that hundreds of thousands – of commerce sites, or just a few e-commerce behemoths vying for the attention and dollars of the online consumer.
That’s you.
So what will it be? Some Net wags believe the latter. I don’t.
As entertaining as it may be to think that some eCommerce Taco Bell will rule the Internet, it just ain’t gonna happen. And that includes the current behemoths like Amazon, CDNow, Wal-Mart and the handful of other large shopping sites. People like choices. They enjoy their personal freedom to choose (which was the premise of the ‘Demolition Man’) and thinking that they would sheepishly allow one merchant to fill all their needs is whistling in the dark.
OK, then. So what will the future of shopping online look like, you ask?
What was it that Dennis Hopper said? “The ‘90s are gonna make the '60s look like the '50s”? OK. So we’re a few years off now but the thinking still applies. We’ve had a resurgence of ‘retro’ these last few years and the Net is adding its own line to Hopper’s quote. The Internet will make the recent turn of this century look more like the turn of the last that adds up to a resurgence of the 19th Century, but this time on a global scale.
In short, we’re becoming a planet of shopkeepers. And that will change the face of eCommerce.
A World of Shopkeepers
How you ask?
In several words – Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay, affiliate programs, buddy spam, peer-to-peer, person-to-person payments – and improve our neighborhoods in the process! All of this by the way, for little or no cost to the online shopkeeper.
Let’s take them one at a time.
Want to open a store? Yahoo!, Amazon, and eBay are more than willing to help. <a href=http://store.yahoo.com/>Yahoo! Store</a> charges as little as $100 month to list up to 50 items for sale in your store. Like other online store builders an individual can build their store entirely through their web browser. At <a href=http://www.amazon.com>Amazon’s Z Shops</a> you can maintain as many as 40,000 items for as little as $39.95 a month.
We all know that eBay lets individuals sell just about anything to anyone at auction. But eBay has introduced a new service to those who are using eBay as their own personal selling channel for their business. It’s called <a href=http://pages.ebay.com/storefronts/seller-landing.html>eBay stores</a>. Currently you can open a store on the Net and list your fixed price and auction items for free until September 1st. After that, it’s $9.95 a month.
But why use one of these server based web sites to sell your wares? You can do it from your own Mac or PC through the magic of peer-to-peer computing.
Peer-to-peer computing was made famous by Napster but now other companies are seeing the advantage of bypassing servers entirely and connecting up PCs to PCs directly. There’s even a business in it for the small Mom & Pop operation that can see the light – Lightshare, that is.
A company called <a href=http://www.lightshare.com/>Lightshare</a> is preparing a service that will allow individual computer users to sell digital goods directly from their computers rather than going through centralized servers from companies like Yahoo! eBay or Amazon. Lightshare enables e-commerce peer-to-peer networks. Through Lightshare, any individual consumer or business can sell products and information directly from their local computer, without the presence of a web site or a server. They have created a new way of buying, selling, sharing, communicating, searching, and browsing for products and services offered by those on the peer-to-peer network.
But what about payment? Anyone serious about selling on the Net must accept credit cards. The new P2P sites, or person-to-person payment systems, come to the rescue here. Companies such as <a href=http://www.paypal.com>PayPal</a> and <a href=https://epay.propay.com/index2.html>ProPay.com</a> will set up an individual, partnership, or small company to accept credit cards from individuals offering secure payment services between consumers. With these P2P payment services, anyone can become a seller and can set up business on the Net.
But if you’re like me, and find, warehousing, selling, shipping and dealing with customer service are headaches you don’t want to dispense with, then joining a merchant affiliate program would fit the bill nicely. By joining an affiliate program offered by merchants on the Net, you don’t have to deal with the normal hassles of selling.
Evolving side by side with the online storefront are affiliate programs. Amazon created the idea a few years ago and now has over 400,000 affiliate webs sites selling their books for a piece of the sale. This concept has exploded and there are now literally thousands of affiliate programs on the Web. All you need to do is market the merchant’s product or service on a free web site you can build at Yahoo! or Excite or NBCi or About, and the merchant will do all the rest.
Can You Say Buddy Spam?
And you don’t even need to have a web site to sell things through an affiliate program.
How? Enter BeFree and their service called B-INTOUCH which will give anyone with an email address the ability to market and sell merchandise on the Web.
Here’s how it works.
Barnes and Nobel was the first to offer BeFree’s service. It’s called – what else – myBarnes and Noble. You go to the B&N site, sign up for the program and get a special URL that identifies you. You then put that URL in every email message you send from now to the end of the world telling your friends and family (and anyone else you can think of) if they buy books from your Barnes and Nobel URL they will help you, finance your child’s education, buy that new boat you were lusting after, or buy a faster computer and a faster connection to send out more emails.
The result? You get a small commission on what you’re hawking and what your friends and family buy. Slick, huh? Can you say – “BuddySpam” boys and girls?
Shopkeepers as Social Engineers
Now, creating a world of shopkeepers could have some unintended side benefits. But first a commentary of my driving habits.
I’m – what you would say – an aggressive driver.
After all, I’m a full-blooded Italian male and the word for ‘pass’ (as in passing a car) in Italian means to surpass or win. And like most drivers, I view other motorists who don’t measure up to my driving standards with a scowl, a horn blast and frantically waving hands. But a funny thing happens to me when I arrive in my neighborhood. I turn from aggressive motorist to friendly neighbor. If I see one of my neighbors performing a driving maneuver that would normally drive me to distraction, I just smile and wave and continue into my garage.
Why?
For the simple reason that I know them and they know me. The autonomy of my car that protects me from my outbursts of frustration on the city streets no longer applies when I see someone I know. You know what I mean. You do it yourself.
The same principle applies when I was growing up in Brooklyn. There was always a stay-at-home busy body or two watching the neighborhood streets, willing and waiting to inform on you. “Frankie. This is Mrs. Krumski. I saw what you did. I’m going to tell your Mother when she gets home!”
So what does this got to do with eCommerce? Plenty. Let me explain.
The Internet is going to change everything. I know. You’ve heard that before. But it’s true. It’s especially true for eCommerce because the Internet will allow anybody with an ounce of entrepreneurial zeal to set up shop on the Web.
It will also, by the way, revitalize our neighborhoods. Here’s how.
A world of shopkeepers will be springing up in neighborhoods across the country and even the globe – each marketing to a particular niche of customers. With more and more people working on the Net from their homes, there would be less need for automobile travel (thus reducing pollution and making for safer neighborhood streets), more people watching the neighborhood (reducing the crime rate) and even neighborhood ‘Happy Hours’ where the residents spend time with each other as they did in the office environment.
The end result – a revitalization of our neighborhoods.
The upside? Less need for patrolling police and our freeways would be turned into skate board ramps! The only downside I see is Mrs. Krumski!
So, yes, dear reader, you can have your taco and eat it too. Thousands of places to shop, easy ways to find products, and thousands of businesses competing for your consumer dollar on the Net.
Let a thousand shopkeepers bloom!
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