Sell Me What I Want,
Not What You Make:
Big Pipes and eCommerce

here seems to be a consistent school of thought in the Internet and ecommerce industries that once consumers get more bandwidth into their homes and offices, ecommerce is going to "really take-off." Cynically, you can look at this situation and say, "Dah, that’s obvious. The current amount of ecommerce being conducted is so small that almost anything will improve it."

The idea that more bandwidth will equal more ecommerce seems rooted in the notion that more bandwidth will allow ecommerce retailers to enhance the buying experience by giving customers more visually appealing purchase information and cues. At the extreme, some ecommerce retailers believe that duplicating the real-world shopping experience will be their ticket to success.

The case for graphics and images enhancing the buying experience is straightforward, but reality may diverge drastically from the hype.
Certainly the buying experience will be enhanced if a vendor is able to offer better pictures of what it sells. In fact, enhancing the visual component of ecommerce could introduce a whole raft of new commodities and products that are more visually oriented into the cyber-bazaar. The beauty behind the success of Amazon.com is that it selected the ideal ecommerce product for its time – books – a basically non-graphic product that is perfectly suited to relational database and text searches. It is unlikely that Amazon.com would have been successful in establishing themselves if they had selected any other (i.e., visually oriented) product. It is only now that Amazon has established a brand name that it has been able to expand into other product lines.

The case for graphics and images enhancing the buying experience is straightforward. However, when that case gets extended to actually duplicating the analog shopping experience, that reality may diverge drastically from the hype.

WalMart, for example, succeeds by keeping people in its stores for as long as possible. If you have ever shopped at one, you may have noticed that the milk and cookies are nowhere near each other and to get from one to the other, you sometimes have to journey through cereal, cosmetics, car batteries, greeting cards and the frozen dairy aisles. All of this carefully calculated to keep you the store as long as possible. Try to get out of a WalMart in less than half an hour. It can’t be done. Perhaps it is this aspect of the visual analog shopping experience that ecommerce vendors hope to duplicate.

There is, however, an inherent contradiction encapsulated within the basic Internet ecommerce model. The underlying technology allows rapid, direct access to specific goods and services; the business models, however, are predicated on luring customers and keeping them within the site for as long as possible.

Internet companies talk about "eyeball minutes." Keeping customers at a site is a balancing act. You want them shopping, but you don’t want to irritate them with nattering screens (remember Prodigy?) and slow transaction times. By making a site fast and efficient for the customer, ecommerce retailers may in fact be undermining their own objective of keeping customers at their sites for as long as possible. This not only lets customers float away too soon (in the minds of the retailers) but also challenges the now popular business model of revving up traffic, selling products at no-profit and making it up with advertising.

By making a site fast and efficient for the customer, ecommerce retailers may in fact be undermining their own objective of keeping customers at their sites for as long as possible.
Aside from improving transaction efficiency, another of the ecommerce benefits promised by increased bandwidth is that it will enable each on-line buying experience to be specifically tailored to the customer, based on previous on-line behavior. It’s sort of the Heisenberg Principle of Uncertainty applied to ecommerce – no product exists until someone wants to buy it, and the fact that someone wants to buy it changes what the product is.

While this last scenario sounds the most interesting, as well as the one that can most alter the way customers buy and vendors sell, it is highly likely that the creation of products based on detailed customer profiles will be heavily balanced by privacy and personal information concerns. As this issue takes shape, the strategic advantages that companies such as Yahoo! have in being able to meld user information with their retail operations may wane. This is going to be an interesting issue, as the personal calendar functions that major portals offer become more popular. Can those calendar providers offer ecommerce retailer’s access to user’s personal calendars?

Regardless of the bandwidth available, if governments around the world cloture the use of user profile information, it may be difficult to move ecommerce much beyond a 24 x 7 x 365 shopping catalog. Ultimately, the sum total of customer experience and product tailoring may be not much more than the title suggestions you now get from Amazon.com or the gift reminders from 1-800-flowers.


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