Crowd Commerce - What the heck....

After a conversation with a friend of mine and some people at work, the question intrigued me, on how to extend the sales of product owners on the one hand and those of web shops owners on the other hand (see my last blog entry on that topic).

During the following days and weeks, a lot of concepts and ideas kept floating through my mind, never knowing how to canalize it in a suitable way. Some of them are so far from the edge that even pros in this field throw a squint on me. Therefore I decided to write them down and see what you people think about them.

The core idea behind it, I have already outlined in my previous post, can be summarized best by the term Crowd Commerce. It all dates back to a book I once read: The wisdom of crowds by James Surowiecki. I got intrigued by the idea that the crowd is one of the most powerful organizational forms and that the crowd is more knowingly than its highest rated member. It is nothing really new, but someone wrote it down in a noteworthy book and people became aware of it.

So, I started to ask myself the question, what would happen if product owners would mainly focus on what they are good at: obtaining products at the best price and handle the sales process. And what would happen if web shops or website owners simultaneously would focus on what they are good at: presenting and recommending products to their customers. Obviously, there would be a gap between both as the product owners miss a suitable way of presenting and selling products whereas the shop owner lacks the ability to buy products at best rates from their producer.

That automatically led me to the question on what needs to be done in order to close that gap and what would happen then? I guess that we would see lots of (small) web shops popping up, having a quite specialized product portfolio they (might) enhance with additional services like suggestions on how to use a specific product or provide construction services.

There are indeed some open questions left to answer, like the handling of delivery costs when odering products belonging to different product owners. Although they were ordered from within a single web shop the customer has to pay each product owner for shipping its product. But from my point of view, that is just a minor problem to solve.

A major topic might be to answer the question if product owners and web shop owners are really willing to give up the area the other part is responsible for: buying products and selling products. But in doing so both contribute to the crowd and therefore to crowd commerce as they do what they are best at. Depending on how their cooperation is defined, the overall crowd leverages its possibilities at its best and all participating parties will win.

As described in the previous blog entry, the iServices platform is a technical approach to translate the ideas of crowd commerce into a platform.

Stay tuned for more information....or get in contact with me, if you are interested in participating ;-)