
Will E Coyote: definitely a maker.
Everything is Everything. What is meant to be will be.
Lauren was probably speaking more towards her personal journey of acceptance and growth, but the phrase often comes to mind when I see ecommerce websites expand their categories and SKU counts. It started, of course, when Amazon realized moved beyond books and into DVDs, CDs, and other bits of consumable media. That all fits– media is media. The stroke of genius came when Amazon realized they had a pretty kick-ass marketing engine and millions of personal preference profiles: why not sell patio gear, clothes, groceries, and weapons? If Chuck Jones were re-doing Road Runner, he’d print Amazon on the side of all the gear.
Zappos learned the lesson the best: find a starting sector that appeals to _all_ customers, and then vector into additional sectors wherever purchasing capital, product feeds, and conversion rates allow. Amazon chose books, Zappos went with shoes. They both sell everything everywhere to everyone now. Welcome to Costco, I love you. I noticed this most directly when I worked at Shoes.com: we saw our competitors like Shoebuy.com expand first into belts, bags, and other accessories, but soon enough they had watches, cute clothes, and anything else they could get their hands on. We chose not to expand categories, because we thought it would water down the brand– the name “shoes.com” is kinda hard to wiggle away from (NOTE TO SELF: next time, pick a domain that’s easy to spell and generic enough to sell anything).
Where is ecommerce headed? Will every online store become an online marketplace, selling everything and anything? The technology for that is certainly in place: companies like Channel Advisor, Ixtens, and Marketfleet have product feeds canned and ready to throw onto your site. It simultaneously empowers the online merchandising managers with a plethora of products and diminishes them by subtracting any need to be choosy: just throw them all on there, see which ones convert well, and have the robots promote hose to the homepage (I’ll be in my office drinking a mai-tai).
Nothing new here, really– all retail operations are tempted to expand categories in order to maximise the return on all that advertising in getting people thru the door or to click on the website. The trick is to figure out which categories are wasteful and which ones are edifying. Walmart’s answer was the Big Box, don’t worry about picking winners and losers, just get a bigger building (the end of gasoline-fueled suburbia may put an end to this method). Department stores answered the problem by abrogating the category-choosing to the subleasing brands: everyone can buy floorspace in Macy’s, if you can afford the rent. Online, there were no restrictions on real estate footprint, and brands are more than willing to pay for placement in the nice slots on the homepage. It’s all about customer flow: online retailers that can manage the flow to the “right” categories will make all the money. This is what powers the whole ecosystem around personalization software like Certona, Monetate, and Adobe.
These “omnitailers” are trying to sell everything to everyone. If they’ve got a unique payment method (ebay, costco, or taobao), or if they’ve got enough money (Amazon or Walmart or Target), they can hinge their model on embracing the ubiquity. For the rest of us, however, we must build some sort of brand. The brand must be something to make the customer choose to buy that Webber Grill from us, instead of the 14 other places he can find it.
There’s another path here, I think: a whole class of websites have cropped up to go the exact opposite direction: the exclusive, the selected, the hand-made. We all know Etsy, but there are many more like her. I don’t mean the exclusive member-only daily-deal sites: those sites are just exploiting an artificial snobbery to invoke an illusion of luxury (all luxury is an illusion, but that’s another day’s topic). I don’t want to try to sell everything to everyone everywhere– besides the sheer joy of volume, where’s the fun in that? I want to sell stuff that’s cool to as many other cool people as I can. The Makers are onto something. We’re seeing new product launches done exclusively via Kickstarter projects. Wanna be cool? Build your own tube amplifier using a cigar box for the case and some arduino controls. These people actually relish the intent-slow process of manufacturing (latin for “create by hand”), and the realization of something unique. Big margins if you can do it right, but not a lot of money overall to pay the staff. There’s incredible branding in this scene, but not a lot of volume (by intent).
Which path will your website follow? The Omnitailer, or the Slow Maker? Is there a way to blend them?




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