This is a guest post written by ranjith boyanapalli. If you like to write for MadrasGeek, you can look at the Guest Post page.
Remember the times when we used to sit in front of the computer being a passive audience? However, that has become nostalgic with the dominant presence of web 2.0. With the advent of Web 2.0, users were able to interact with one another and could contribute to the content back.
This changed the rules of many games including communication, networking, job searches and public opinions. The twitter trend and blogs pretty much decide the fate of a movie within a few hours of its release. The public has now discovered a very strong medium to reach out, discuss and collate opinions. Professionally, colleagues rate and comment on each other’s performance thereby helping the recruiters to headhunt easily. Leisure social networks have connected friends who were lost for ages to quickly indulge in an online game together. While web has moved on to web 2.0, the way online shopping happens however still remains the same. The extent to which web 2.0 has contributed to online shopping is limited to the product reviews and product ratings.
I believe that e-commerce has migrated to a 2.0 model only when a consumer truly benefits from the transaction made by some other consumer whom he may or may not know. When technology is advanced enough to figure out when people have poked, mailed or tweeted it should extend to collating similar purchases made by people all over. This will introduce a whole new concept of “social shopping” where people know what others are buying and get it cheaper when they buy along with others not necessarily knowing any of the other consumers. The technology would do the job of collating the purchases and mapping it on the well know volume-price principle to get the prices lower for all.
Two leading models who are in my opinion closest to e-commerce 2.0 and have tasted amazing success in the US are groupon.com and woot.com. While the former deals with bringing best local deals of the city, the latter cummulates demand and restricts supply to just one product a day, thereby both capitalizing on the collative buying power. India will now certainly witness clones of the above website and also some with variations of it, targeting to harness the power the massive Indian retail market. This certainly is a good trend which clearly proposes a win-win situation for both consumers and suppliers and we have to wait and watch as to how well e-commerce 2.0 would spread in India. What are your thoughts?
Guest Post is written by Ranjith Boyanapalli, the founder of www.buytheprice.com a online shopping portal focusing only on deals on brands where a consumer gets iot cheaper thanks to many others who buy the same product.
If you like to write for MadrasGeek, you can look at the Guest Post page.
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E-commerce is also changing =)
Whats E-commerce 2.0 then compared to current E-commerce. I can see how the Web 2.0 era is different but I don’t see how you have applied that to e-commece?