Welcome to the new edition of “This week’s news”, a selection of links to interesting articles and news from the worlds of blogs, commerce and e-commerce.
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At the beginning of the week, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was interviewed by Charlie Rose in the popular CBS show “60 Minutes”. Among other topics, Bezos prepared the audience for a future in which Amazon might deliver goods to people’s homes by drones within only 30 minutes from the time of purchase. According to him, this might already be possible in 4 to 5 years. It is unclear whether he actually believes that or if it only was a clever PR stunt to get attention during the hot Christmas shopping season. However, the latter happened in any case, with media everywhere reporting about the story, and a parcel service like UPS responding with its own announcement of drone shipping experiments.
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Commerce would for sure be revolutionized (again) if instant shipping by drone would become possible. But even without that piece of sci-fi, the industry is changing rapidly. Marty Manley describes the death of Brick and Mortar-retail, which is mainly being caused by the Internet.
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On the other hand, offline retail might not totally be doomed. According to book author Chris Malone, research shows that Brick and Mortar retail stores play a critical role in building lasting customer loyalty. So even if retail companies lose lots of their former offline sales volume, they still can use flagship locations to establish a connection with potential customers – even if they do their actual purchases on the web.
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One of the driving forces of the current changes in e-commerce is the rise of mobile devices. eMarketer has found out that in the UK 10 percent of all e-commerce sales are being generated on tablets. That already quite impressive number is likely to explode within the near future, so online retailers better get their shops optimized for mobile touch screen devices.
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There is also fresh e-commerce research data from Sweden! According to that, 75 percent of Swedes are online-shoppers, and one out of four has already bought something using a smartphone or tablet.