The 4C's of Social Commerce: Part 1 - Memory Lane on Plain Jane Commerce, ca.1997 - Ashley Heather

This is the first of our four part series on the 4Cs of Social Commerce We39ll follow up this discussion of Commerce with subsequent considerations of Content Community and Context all of which together in our view represent Social Commerce in its current bestpractice entiretyIn the early stages when the first wave of shoppers went online a decade and a half ago it was plain Jane ecommerceamp8212neither pretty nor terribly effective More and more as the digital becomes integrated with all aspects and every stage of shopping its electronic dimensions will become less marginalized Ecommerce will lose the 39e39 to become simply CommerceSocial Commerce is its most recent evolutionamp8212and its most dynamic satisfying and lucrative You can still find many primitive sites out there scraping online sales with circa1998 techniquesamp8212true enough Basic is classic The foundation is that solid But not only are later generations of strategies and tactics considerably more robust consumer expectations are also rising so that those who stay behind in their safe zone will find sales steadily dwindling It bears saying in retrospect how far we have comeAt first online shopping felt like a risky proposition at best It meant having to send your credit card information out into cyberspace where clever rascals could suck it out of the ether to steal your money The technology by contemporary standards was primitive Modems moved at crawl speed Computers were constantly crashing Sites never worked Beachballing was the norm In retrospect the whole experience was painfulNot that it didn39t have its upside tooamp8212like errh quotNo sales taxquot no matter that you were supposed to report the sale in your own state of residence and pony up the sales tax thereThe internet became available for commercial use in 1991 became the hot new thing in 1994 and within a few yearsamp8212once security protocols were developed that allowed consumers to have relative confidence in handing over their credit card infoamp8212online stores were popping up in unprecedented profusion all across the web It had arrivedThis first wave of ecommerce had come out of the socalled Information Revolution and for the most part it looked like it Photos were shabby and crunchy the point was to keep them lowres for fast loading Generic design templates made everything look homogenously bland like it was all produced by the US Post Office Product specs were what matteredamp8212size color qty etcOfferings were generally lowpriced commodity merchandiseamp8212ie known quantities discernible by SKU with manufacture list priceamp8212so we could endlessly research to find the best price on any item We didn39t have price comparison engines yet but still we could suddenly shop around for the cheapest as never beforeamp8212anywhere in the Continental United States Consequently we no longer felt like the victim of our local brick ampamp mortars with their unfriendly high marginsFrom the perspective of small local businesses new markets opened up far and wide For a long time the web with its sophisticated search engines felt like an even playing field Niche enterprises were especially well servedamp8212critical mass was hard to achieve on a merely local basis You could now reach a vastly wider audience of potential customers without having to invest in expensive print ads to get eyeballsamp8212or catalogs paper printing postage Much of the country was sparsely populated This was the way to access those markets The emergence of Fed Ex and other expedited shipping carriers certainly didn39t hurtCompanies like LL Bean and Columbia House Records were going strong alongside large retailers intent on accessing smalltown America with mailorder catalog businesses The 1800NUMBER was king When ecommerce emerged these retailers had something that the flagships themselves couldn39t matchamp8212mature orderfulfillment systems warehouses and customer service centers Thus it was the catalog divisions of major retailers who in the first wave of the ecommerce revolution came to own ecommerce across AmericaMany saw the challenge as simply as getting the business39s mailorder inventory up online It was a logistical problem The first order of business was cataloging all that stuffamp8212getting a shot of it and all the product specsamp8212especially tricky because any two things might appear next to each other so they needed to be presented in parallel fashion What much of America didn39t realize is that it was hardly ever the same merchandise mix as the store carriedamp8212usually less sophisticated styles less fashion forward and at a lower price point The fact is that many of the large retailers had become internally siloed with different divisions essentially operating as entirely different companies with independent selections and promotionsThis early web business was still about squeezing the extra little bit out of the toothpaste tube It was still a very small percentage of overall sales At the end of the day the catalog people never really concerned themselves overly much with branding Their point of view for better or worse was based on solid facts What they knew was that some items simply sold better than others What mattered was sticking to the low price points just like in fcommerce now proper placement on the page getting the item to the customer in time for the holidays amp8212and free shipping The numbers told them all this The tricky part with which they concerned themselves was the backend and order fulfillmentBut not all early web businesses were so smallminded Amazon39s much bigger vision continues to form an important part of the foundation of contemporary Web best practice A pure webbased business with no brick and mortar presence nor retail sales staffamp8212the theory wentamp8212it could offer consumers better prices Without expensive catalogs to print and mail it could offer a bottomless inventory online where real estate was cheap Warehouses too could be stationed off in the hinterlands with far reduced operating costs In a sense this was the selfserve automat variety of the classic direct marketing business circa 1968 It was a compelling model although ironically Amazon didn39t have a single profitable year until 2003But the space presented unique challenges First among them was teaching the customer how to find the product they wanted Sites quickly learned there were two distinct patterns of shoppingamp8212searching to find what you want if you know and browsing to check out the options to discover something exciting and new To succeed they had to serve both Presciently Amazon pioneered top nav category tabs to organize the immense Chinese encyclopedia of stuff into a manageable menu of options The basic scheme is still largely in place Onsite product search became a scienceFurther teaching the customer to navigate the complicated mazes of the checkout process was an even greater challenge Cart abandonment was rampant Shoppers wanted the stuff but no matter how they tried they just couldn39t complete the process Many of even the basic concepts eluded them It39s worth remembering there were no conventions yet in place Things like a shopping cart and breadcrumbs were not yet firmly established Many brands even insisted on their own more branded nomenclature and processes Tiffany doesn39t have a shopping cartFor many the answer was their own User Testing This often meant the marketing team on the other side of a oneway mirror gasping in horror at unforeseen user mistakes When in reality we as a digital society were all just beginning to learn the shame is that many executives at this time lost faith in the intelligence of their customer resulting in a heritage of painfully explicit sites with every simple intuitive step so overexplained notes to Grandma as to seem baffling in its complexity Obviously in retrospect it was we digital marketers who had to learn What we hadn39t anticipated back then was the immense collective intelligence of the contemporary consumer It is something we are only beginning to understandFortunately conventions did take hold Navigating complicated processes is now for the mainstream consumer second nature This early eCom generation with Amazon leading the way pioneered many of the bestpractices still in use today creating an amazing foundation for future generations to build on Some innovations like ratings ampamp reviews and personalized recommendations again Amazon39s are only now coming into flower across the webEarly eCom sites promised shoppers convenience selection and lower prices To achieve that they sacrificed the Pleasure of the experience and the fuller dimensionality of People and Places Not surprisingly it is precisely these timevalued aspects of classic shopping that nextgeneration web businesses have been working to achieve ever sinceamp8212with increasing success along the wayThis is part 1 of a 4 part story about evolution of social commerce and the 4Csamp8212 Commerce Content Community and finally Context In our next weekly installment we39ll explore Content as it evolved at the next stage Read the introduction heredotbox CEO Ashley Heather is one of the pioneers at the intersection of ecommerce social interaction and locationaware services His companies include Musikube and Entertainment Media Works which brought us StarStyle StyleLogue and Plinkingamp8212in 2004 among the first Social Commerce websites In his native London he was the lead digital consultant at Impact Plus and an executive at Ford Motor Company He is a frequent speaker at media industry events including iBreakfast CTIA Wireless The Digital Coast Roundtable MoMeMo Social Media Week and is an Associate Member of IADAS He can be reached at ashleydotboxcomRead all Ashley39s MediaBizBloggers commentaries at dotboxCheck us out on Facebook at MediaBizBloggerscomFollow our Twitter updates MediaBizBloggerMediaBizBloggers is an openthought leadership blog platform for media marketing and advertising professionals companies and organizations To contribute contact Jackmediadvisorygroupcom The opinions expressed in MediaBizBloggerscom are not those of Media Advisory Group its employees or other MediaBizBloggerscom contributors Media Advisory Group accepts no responsibility for the views of MediaBizBloggers authors

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The 4C's of Social Commerce: Part 1 - Memory Lane on Plain Jane Commerce, ca.1997 - Ashley Heather

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