The Ecommerce Scam
alex.posterous.com
The Ecommerce Scam
1–10 of 11 posts
Re: The Ecommerce Scam
#2I don't think it is a scam to sell products with different features and specifications and allow the customer to choose the product that is right for them. Could search technology improve this process? Sure, but it isn't a scam.
Furthermore, cameras used in the example are quite different -- the more expensive camera shoots 720p video, has optical image stabilization, and a larger display.
Re: The Ecommerce Scam
#3I don't think it is a scam to sell products with different features and specifications and allow the customer to choose the product that is right for them. Could search technology improve this process? Sure, but it isn't a scam. Furthermore, cameras used in the example are quite different -- the more expensive camera shoots 720p video, has optical image stabilization, and a larger display.
I just went looking to see if the $114 camera did HD video, since I'm planning to upgrade my Canon five megapixel camera explicitly to get HD video and big enough storage to make it worth having. So, for me, that's a huge feature difference. I don't know if I'm an average digital camera consumer, but I'm definitely not a serious photographer or videographer.
Re: The Ecommerce Scam
#4I agree with Alex. We can say that e-commerce is still in the "pre-google" phase, by analogy to search.
E-commerce sites could be much more than electronic mail-order catalogs. Amazon has tapped one dimension with customer reviews, but there's enormous room for improvement.
As Alex points out, the burden is still on the consumer to perform labor-intensive research. We need to change this.
Re: The Ecommerce Scam
#5I don't think it is a scam to sell products with different features and specifications and allow the customer to choose the product that is right for them. Could search technology improve this process? Sure, but it isn't a scam. Furthermore, cameras used in the example are quite different -- the more expensive camera shoots 720p video, has optical image stabilization, and a larger display.
"the more expensive camera shoots 720p video, has optical image stabilization, and a larger display."
Which sounds like one codec chip that is still too new to be a commodity, one routine that takes a lot of time and effort to get really right, and an actually more expensive part. Additionally, the internals for the video might require a more expensive bus going out to the storage device and possible more cache memory to grease the wheels. I'm not having a hard time believing this all adds up to around $100 of parts and design labor. Maybe it doesn't, but it's enough I'd want to see proof of the claim the customer is getting ripped off.
Re: The Ecommerce Scam
#6I think jordanf's startup Kallow has been doing a great job hitting this market, at least for me. Even as a technical consumer, I don't want to do in-depth review searches, I simply want to optimize for ( value / price ) / time. I've made four purchases based on Kallow and have been very happy.
Kallow certainly isn't the ultimate answer, but it's a step in the right direction.
Re: The Ecommerce Scam
#7Be careful what you wish for: generating a diversity of ever-better options for the savvy consumers is at least partially subsidized with the margins extracted from inattentive 'casual' consumers.
Reduce those margins, and it's possible that the prices paid by savvy shoppers could go up, and the pace of innovation -- exploring the technology/marketing solution space -- go down.
Re: The Ecommerce Scam
#8I have a couple of concerns with this article, however, I do generally agree with most of the author's thoughts.
1. Title is deceptive, it should have been labeled 'Deceptive Pricing Scam' or 'A need for better product reviews' and not 'E-commerce Scam'. It's a blank statement with no meaning. Almost every website in the electronic shopping sphere offers orders of magnitude better than the brick & mortar alternative, which is zero, with regard to reviews. Additionally, this sort of price problem exists in both traditional retail and online shopping. How is the problem specific to online shopping?
2. Saying that Amazon returns 24,000 hits for Canon Digital Camera as a problem is like saying Google returns 12,400,000 for the same search (which it does). Search is evolving in all areas, not just e-commerce.
3. I'm going to assume that the statement 'no innovation has been made since the 90s' was in specific reference to product review/consumer option entitlement. Leaps and bounds of improvement have been made to user interface, credit card security, guided navigation, payment options, search (believe it or not), scalability, advanced marketing, etc.
Re: The Ecommerce Scam
#9I don't think it is a scam to sell products with different features and specifications and allow the customer to choose the product that is right for them. Could search technology improve this process? Sure, but it isn't a scam. Furthermore, cameras used in the example are quite different -- the more expensive camera shoots 720p video, has optical image stabilization, and a larger display.
Could search technology improve this process?
I'm assuming that's where he is going. From his twitter bio: Currently co-founding an ecommerce search company.
Re: The Ecommerce Scam
#10Be careful what you wish for: generating a diversity of ever-better options for the savvy consumers is at least partially subsidized with the margins extracted from inattentive 'casual' consumers. Reduce those margins, and it's possible that the prices paid by savvy shoppers could go up, and the pace of innovation -- exploring the technology/marketing solution space -- go down.
But the direction/efficiency of innovation would improve.
Better to spend money that encourages companies to research more genuinely useful products rather than products that simply may be more marketable because they have a useless extra 2 megapixels.