Links and thoughts about the November panel

Thanks to the panelists and to the members who attended the last meetup.
Attached are the links to the video recording for those of you who couldn’t make it.  It is broken up into 4 parts.

Here’s a quick rundown of the November panel …
Ankur, from Blumberg Capital, divided ecommerce into a set of stages:

1. Who are you really targeting (e.g. behavioral, vertical, etc)?

2. Once you identified your customer base, how do you drive them to your site?

3. Once you have people coming into your site, how do you deliver a personalized experience (e.g. recommendation engine)?  This stage is ripe for new innovation.  Vijay, from Mertado, suggested  innovations such as content-based commerce, app-based commerce, or the fusion of offline/online retail.

4. After converting a visitor to a customer, what types of services do you deliver to them?  Jai, from ShopSocially, suggested that these customers need to be converted into a ‘brand ambassadors’ because the number 1 predictor of a visitor purchasing an item is if the item has been recommended by someone that the visitor trusts.  Eric, from Slice, offered a different twist to this area by enabling customers to aggregate and analyze their past purchase transactions across multiple ecommerce sites.

The panel then had a lively discussion with our savvy audience about some of the potential pitfalls of ecommerce.  What I learned was that privacy may not be as big an issue as some pundits think.  People, in fact, freely share quite a bit of information about themselves.  Instead, we need to have a more nuanced approach to privacy.  For example, a person may only want to share certain types of purchases with his friends, such as computers or furniture appliances; he may not want to share the great deal at Walgreen’s on Preparation-H cream.  😛

Another audience member brought another valid point that sharing information may actually inhibit ecommerce transactions.  An example might be a scarf that a woman purchased.  Assuming that women, in general, want to dress somewhat differently from their friends, they might be disinclined to buy the scarf.

We’d love to know your thoughts and questions about the meetup and how we can improve future meetings.

Happy Holidays

Cheers

Chris

Part A

Part B

Part C

Part D