Rudelle Blogging

The exponential growth of mashups should lead to a sharp increase of destination sites. As a result, tens of new exciting Web sites will mushroom daily in the coming years.
However, despite this major trend, let’s bear in mind that there is another wave pushing in an opposite direction.
The idea behind this new wave is as follows: to get their favourite contents, why surfers should be obliged to browse around dozens of different web sites? Wouldn't it be more efficient to get all this content directly pushed in one central place?
This is how was born the idea of personal aggregator. At the beginning, it was just about getting all your RSS feeds on a single page. But this new ecosystem quickly became much more sophisticated. Now, you can easily and freely aggregate thousands of contents from all different sources ranging from weather forecast, email notification, auction tracking, stocks alerts…
The current battle is about who will control this personal aggregator: either a central supplier (as Google and Yahoo! or even Netvibes as a challenger) or either it will be directly integrated in the web browser (Microsoft and Firefox strategy).
In this new world, the challenge for content providers changes radically. It is mo more a question of how to attract surfers on the most beautiful site of the world. Now it’s about making its content accessible on each personal aggregator. As space on this personal aggregator is inevitably limited, the battle for space between content providers will be fierce. Each inch gained on competition will be a victory!
2007 will be an exciting and key year in the field. Comparing mahsups and personal aggregator, we should see which force proves to be the more dynamic.

The Wal-Mart type large big retailers built up their amazing success mastering three key functions: sourcing, merchandising and logistics. This combination of factors allowed them to crush down traditional mum and dad retailers and to impose a new model.
The first generation of e-commerce sites adapted this wining model on line. After a difficult start in the late 90’s learning the specificities of the Internet channel, large on line retailers today successfully master the three key area of expertise: sourcing, logistics and merchandising. Thanks to a critical mass of increasingly mature buyers, most of them now experience high volumes and attractive profitability. With a 30% growth per annum which does not seem to slow down, e-commerce has a bright future.
However, this nice picture is likely to break into pieces in the coming years. First of all, in the flat world of the Internet, the fortress of sourcing is disaggregating with an amazing speed. The most obscure manufacturers are increasingly easy to spot on line. With little work and a good vertical specialization, almost anyone can source the best product in the most remote place of the virtual world.
Regarding logistics, the growth of Fedex, UPS and other large shipping companies also makes it easy for any individual to send anything anywhere, being as reliable as any big corporation.
Furthermore, the growing maturity of many Internet technologies (which belongs to the Web 2.0 wave) is combining with the collapse of band-width and storage costs. This opens the door to an exponential growth of innovative e-merchandising concepts. New tools make it possible to create on line shops are indeed becoming so simple and powerful. Any single individual entrepreneur can unleash his marketing creativity for a very low investment. As a result, new innovative merchandising concepts are launched every day on the web at a extremely rapid pace.
Without saying that price comparisons are so easy on Internet. This makes it is much more difficult for an e-merchant to replicate a classical tactic of brick and mortar retailers: lure customers with some huge discounts on a couple of very visible products, and generate fat margins derived from impulse purchases.
The combination of these strong trends has a crucial consequence: selling on the Internet has become a commodity. We see the rise of a huge world ecosystem of small entrepreneurs who invest into all possible e-commerce niches. This army of anonymous Joes whose cost structures are close to zero, represents a very serious threat for the large e-retailers. This had made the fortune of an eBay, but the phenomenon goes today well beyond auctions.
Nevertheless, in this second e-commerce revolution, the large e-retailers have a very smart card to play. I will get back to this in my next post.

Following the announcement of the partnership between eBay and Google at the end of last August, eBay stock has gained a steady 1.86%. However, on second thoughts, this giant deal seems rather surprising.
What is really behind this deal? As with Yahoo! for the United States, the king of auctions chose Google to fill its international sites with ads. This astonishing decision will create a new form of competition for all the small sellers on eBay. While seeking for a new revenue stream, eBay takes the risk to angry its most valuable asset: those thousands of small eBay sellers. It is likely that the recent pressure on eBay bottom line has push toward this delicate choice.
The other part of the agreement is also symptomatic. The deal consists in developing with Google a common click-to-call offer on its site, by leveraging on Skype. The trouble is that most click-to-call experts say that the vast majority of customers (almost 85%) prefer to use landlines rather than computers to call. Thus Skype ends up to be rather a barrier than anything else for the deal.
This seems to illustrate the difficult integration of Skype into eBay. Skype is a formidable telephone operator. Its economic model of voice over IP is very strong. On the other hand, synergies with eBay are far from obvious. That is for two reasons.
First able, a large part of Skype customer base is located in Brazil and India, that is to say very far from eBay customer base. The second reason is that allowing buyers to call sellers (which was the main rational of Skype takeover in the first place) was not welcome by those very precious sellers. Indeed, sellers are already having a hard time to cope with all the emails from buyers. The idea of having to answer buyer queries by phone gives them nightmares.
The future of eBay seems rather in pushing quickly towards Web 2.0 and smart collaborative filtering, as is doing Amazon. By offering a much more systematic usage of its fabulous “Long Tail”, eBay will greatly boost its powerful community of sellers. And as a result, securing its long term bottom line.