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E-Commerce and Online Shoppers
“Rather than stitch a bunch of diamonds on them and say, ‘This is a pair of $4,000 sunglasses,’ we decided to put $4,000 worth of work into them,” said Colin Baden, chief executive of Oakley, which is owned by Luxottica Group, of Italy. The company plans to make 250 pairs, he added, and demand is so high that “they’re not spending any time in the stores.”
This recent quote on the New York Times website regarding luxury sunglass’s produced by well known brand Oakley really got me thinking.
It really signifies something rather interesting for e-commerce, that as well as retail blogs providing a rich and interactive way for retailers to gauge consumer behaviour, trends and opinion, they may also act as a form of virtual foot fall in themselves.
Why waste time and money in physical product development for the high street, when a virtual product can be peddled online cheaper, faster and indicate potential consumer sales interest before resources are invested in its production.
We’re all used to purchasing virtual products and services; perhaps sunglass’s is the next step forward! As a society we are becoming increasingly comfortable and trusting in the products descriptions view online, in years past consumers wanted to touch and feel a product, to try it out and re-assure themselves of product quality. Now however consumers seem content to trust in broadly accessible resources for rating and reviewing products online. Shoppers have come together to increase not only product awareness for retailers via the viral qualities of social media, but to inform and direct one another to the best deals. There truly is nowhere for bad service to hide online.
E-commerce trends are rapidly making online retail a viable reality to smaller vendors, who in previous years may have had little chance of breaking into the high street. The internet potentially allows vendors to advertise products for sale from their suppliers that they may not have in stock, thus reducing cash flow and overhead problems associated with purchasing stock that high street vendors experience every day. This allows retailers to offer consumers more products while physically investing less upfront in their business.
This collaboration of resources is demonstrated well by the rise in Web Hosting Re-seller packages, the infrastructure and resources required to run the ventures are leased while the consumer is offered a transparent experience and has no idea that the re-seller is using 3rd party infrastructure to make the sale viable. In times of recession maximising your audience while minimising your overheads is a essential to success. E-commerce is really set to innovate they way it offers its products to consumers, as attempts to maximise hits to sales ratios for business’s becomes more than preferable but essential.
Author: Simon English – Purple Coffee Interactive, Guernsey, Channel Islands.
