From eCommerce to Mobile

So enough talk about how Mobile is going to change your personal world, and the ecommerce world, what about the enterprise IT world?  They are still fairly entrenched in Windows and LAMP based infrastructure and will probably be for some time.  But this doesn’t mean mobile is out in these worlds.  Anyone in IT, even at smaller companies, will tell you that there is a lot of activity going on to bring mobile into the fold and it is driven from the executive suite.  Why?  Mobile is the best thing since sliced bread for the sales force, and sales drives business.  But mobile, to a certain extent is a nightmare for the IT professional trying to lock down every portal and defend against the increasingly sophisticated attacks coming at them in volume these days.  So applaud any IT group that is taking on mobile - it ain’t easy.  But one of the very interesting things coming out of all of this is that the IT approach being taught and increasingly adopted these days is to design more flexibility into the infrastructure in the first place so that IT can better keep up with the rapidly evolving world of mobile.  And the coolest part of this is that with new flexibility in the enterprise IT framework, you open yourself to a whole new world of opportunity on the enterprise side that was just tough to get into back in the day when the IT manager kept a permanent “GO AWAY” sign on their front door for any new vendor.  And of course, where there is new opportunity and new flexibility, and less rigid, lock-down control, innovation flourishes, new companies emerge, and the world changes, again.   

So I just bought a garage door opener remote and a replacement flask for my running waist gear on Amazon, two very different items.  The last time I bought the garage door opener remote was on a garage door opener site.  The running gear, I originally bought on a running gear site.  On those sites, the recommendation engine had an easy time recommending products.  But on Amazon, after buying the second product, it was clear that even the algorithm of the great Amazon was starting to break down, trying to figure out what to recommend to someone that just bought two products with basically no connection.  It even tried to reach back and recommend something based on a previous purchase, but unfortunately for them, it must have been something my wife purchased a couple years ago for kids that are now much older and need a whole different set of products.  I am actually a pretty big sucker for recommended products, so whatever value Amazon could have extracted from me if they could have figured out what to recommend next was lost in the oblivion that is Amazon’s massive product selection.  So for me, the moral of the story, as great as it is to have everything under the sun available on one site, and obviously Amazon handles it pretty well, the rest of us in the eCommerce world are much better off using focused market segmentation on our websites with a controlled set of products optimized for a specific market and just owning that niche.  You can typically charge more on average, realize higher conversion of traffic, drive higher total sales averages, and get a much better return on your recommendations.