e-commerce

Having read stories about what constituted for many the fiasco of e-commerce at Christmas 1999, when it was over-hyped as the greatest festival of e-trading that the world had ever seen, a few comments seem appropriate to be made.

E-commerce is, in many respects, a replacement of high street shopping in that it allows for shopping from home at, apparently, the flick of a switch on your computer. The aspects which were overlooked is what happens after that, i.e., processing and delivery of goods. Bricks and mortars retailers are already geared to this process, either by handing goods over the counter, or offering a home delivery service. There is a smooth and synchronized line between the shop attendant, the cashier, the delivery and the stock room. This link seems to have been missing, at worst, or faltering, in many other cases, on e-trading outlets. Either because there is no such a link between the computers and the dispatch section of the e-retailer that can process a large number of orders in a short period of time, such as Christmas, or because not enough school-leavers were hired to wrap the goods, or deficiencies in the transport infrastructure to do the delivery rounds, e-retailing did not live up to its promises. On this sense, economy of scale will, probably, play a great part on the filtering of those e-retailers who will be able to survive. The small guy in e-commerce is in no best position than the small guy in bricks and mortar commerce. What has happened is, simply, that the overheads have been moved from the front to the back of the shop, but they are still there. E-retailing is no more, after all, than a glorified form of catalogue shopping.

A distribution service that suits the customers rather than the e-retailers, with a much faster delivery times that seems to be the case at present, will, most probably, also plays a part for the survival of e-retailers. The 9 to 5 mentality will have to be ditched, computer technology in e-commerce will have to be used not only for ordering goods at the customer’s end, but also indicating suitable time spans for good to be delivered, at any time of the day, or night, to the convenience of the customer. E-commerce also means a 24 hours society.

There are areas of commerce which are not only still most unsuitable most of the time for e-retailing, but which will remain as such forever, such as high and medium brow fashion, where the customer wants to see, to feel the quality of the garments, and how it does fit, or suit her or him. Even in book selling, there is still those of us who get tempted by just browsing in a book shop rather just flicking switches on a computer screen. There is a place for Amazon.com, but there is also a place for Waterstones and Page One. I am very doubtful about buying vegetables in the net, for the same reason that I stopped buying in some stalls in the market, where the trader will pick up tomatoes from the back of the box rather than those nice ones on display.

A cursory analysis of successful e-commerce ventures reveals that those companies, or individuals, that produce and deliver the goods electronically through the internet rather than physically at home, are those who seems, at the moment, to be able to be making any money out of it. However unsavoury it may be, this is one of the lessons that should be learnt from the sex industry. E-information services, by subscription, or internet delivered goods such as music, films and shows, games, objects such as ‘Creatures’, which are not really games, although it sold as such, seems to have learnt this lesson from the darker sides of the net. The capital necessary to set up such ventures is extremely low, compared to e-retailers’ capital hungry outfits. This is an area where the small guy could, not only survive, but thrive within an area of the economy that it is becoming taken over by large financial concerns day after day, a process which is happening very fast indeed. Netscape having been swallowed by AOL and Time-Warner as the only way it could survive Bill Gates’ onslaught, is a good example of this phenomena.