Mercantec: Strategy (Part 2 of 8)
1. Mercantec
2. Strategy
3. Opportunity
4. Business Model
5. Market Assessment & Competition
6. Technology
7. Risks
8. Net/Net
Strategy
The transition from niche product builder to solutions provider is driven by a very simple fact: while Mercantec has been providing the technology, its customer base has been looking for ways to sell more merchandise. Because of its position in the transaction chain, in some respects Mercantec can actually be viewed as a sales consulting company, not a technology provider. Opting for this strategy means Mercantec needs to fuel the growth of its software technology license base by developing innovative ways to help its customers meet their increased sales goals. Achieving this will ultimately transform Mercantec from being simply a provider of a niche technology into being a supplier of an entire framework for commerce-a framework that includes a unique buyer-amplification technology. Mercantec calls this framework perpetual commerce (Figure 2).
Figure 2
Mercantec believes its commerce framework will help merchants develop an entirely different psychological environment for shopping-specifically, one that is more sensitive to the ways in which women appear to shop. Surveys show that although women do 75% of all household shopping, they still represent only about 40% of online shoppers. The theory is that women are context shoppers-they tend to want to browse a category and see what's near and around the object of their shopping excursion. The converse is that men are targeted shoppers-they go for exactly what they want and don't browse much. Because context shoppers garner their ideas from external cues such as TV, books and magazines, Mercantec is gearing up to provide a mechanism that drives shoppers to merchants via relevant content sources. For example, an online version of Martha Stewart's Living magazine could be linked to a Mercantec commerce mall portal; the content would then be hyperlinked to a relevant merchant or merchants within the mall.
Part 3 - Opportunity