30/30 e-commerce
E-commerce
E-commerce must consist of something more than converting a product line or catalogue into html. The easiest, most efficient, intuitive, and generally smoothest way of shopping is still to be discovered in many areas.
Many people would like to buy more online, but the big labels don’t necessarily support this wish. Small businesses are still not really incorporated in the online system, due to the lack of greater collaboration and cooperation that is essential.
The elimination of distributors as an inevitable intermediary in the physical world has barely started. The logic of the online process would imply that the producer and the distributor converge into one figure, so that each manufacturer or creator sells directly to the consumer.
Illustration: Edmon de Haro
Many e-commerce initiatives do not appear to consider something that seems blatantly obvious: that e-commerce will only work when it offers an improvement on the physical shopping experience.
Once the initial concerns about the slowing of the expansion in e-commerce are overcome, it is safe to say that over the next few decades the digital platform will become the predominant media for commerce.
E-commerce must seek a closer relationship with the customer: a more intimate relationship that will end up including everything from co-creation processes with consumers to analysis and prediction tools that will go so far as to predict the buyer’s own decision.
The digital world seems to tend paradoxically towards the creation of large monopolies. It seems that each market is held up by a structure formed of one or two enormous companies that attend to the general demand, and hundreds of small companies that dedicate themselves to niche audiences.
Is anybody wandering how everything will change, or about the social and economic implications when 50%, 60%, 70% or more of commerce ends up being digital?
From our book 30/30: 30 ideas for 2030.
