Is Cash-on-Delivery really eCommerce? if yes, then what is (also) Mobile Commerce?

We've all read about how eCommerce is bigger than it looks. There are needs other than actual purchasing that eCommerce fills. Amazon, it seems, has overtaken Google in the US as the startingpoint of product-search. In order to make a purchasing decision, you need information, and an eCommerce site is (or should be, it is believed), in the business of providing the same. Therefore, what you can also do is also use eCommerce only for the purpose of decision-making, deciding what to buy, maybe even where to buy - but not actually buying. 

A recent BCG report ("From Buzz to Bucks") have called this internet-influenced buying.

What also happens is the reverse - people don't know what an Xperia J looks like, weigh or feel like, so they go to a mall, check it out, come back and purchase online where prices are better for the same standard product. This is split by consultants (naturally) into (guess-what) a 2X2, with segments called Research-Online-Buy-Offline, Research-Offline-Buy-Online, and of-course the other two blocks of people who complete the buying process Online or Offline. The transaction will be called Online or Offline basis where it is *consummated*. So this is the first thought I'd like you to hold on to.

The third thought is a simple question - is Cash-on-Delivery eCommerce? The "transaction" i.e. the exchange of goods for consideration really happens after the goods are delivered to the shipping address, acknowledged, checked and then paid for. The entire decision-making process and the commitment to buy has happened online, but the transaction is really offline.

Now the second thought is just an extension of the same logic to say there are people who extensively use the mobile phone to research, but then open their PCs / laptops next morning to transact - maybe because screens are larger, or keyboards are better, or connectivity is better, or just due to plain habits. The use case for the reverse is thinner but still non-zero. You could have used your laptop to make a decision (where you can actually compare four products'-specs side by side), and then used your mobile to monitor prices and then when you saw the price drop to the level you wanted - maybe you were on your way home then - you just clicked on 'Buy' on the mobile.

Now putting it all together, if you read this at one go, it will appear that Mobile Commerce is bigger than it is. If CoD is eCommerce (and rightfully so) then mobile-initiated transactions are m-commerce. That can help change perspectives of a lot of organizations in countries like India where we keep thinking m-commerce has not happened yet just because there aren't enough transactions culminated on the mobile. 

How different is "my" customer and "yours"?

So many brand discussions start with customer profiling. There are deep dissections on the difference between our customers and those of our competition. Our customer is more open to using her credit card online while the competition's customer favors cash on delivery. Our customer is older but more evolved. Our lapsers are more likely to be staying in big cities. It stops striking some of us after a point that we're using a cognitive shortcut by giving an identity to an aggregate average statistic.

More importantly, we forget that in many if not all cases, all these different identities are just one person. These many customers aren't different people who behave differently. Our customer also shops with the competition. Our customer is the competition's customer.

This is not trivial. We draw up pen-portraits, day-in-life's, mood-boards of preferences and so on and forth for these supposedly different characters. We do qualitative research around customer groups that are 'our customers' and 'our lapsers' or 'competition customers' to understand them better. If we see the same person turning up in two groups, we suspect incorrect recruitment if not foul-play and impersonation. How could the agency mix up our customers with theirs? Or customers with non-customers? Sounds familiar?

If there are more men in the people who end up converting on my platform versus my competitor's, this may show up as 'our customer is 70% male while our competitor's is 80% female'. I think it starts off being a small poetic license (the use of the singular) and ends up sounding inane. There is no one out there who is 70% or 20% male.

Reality check - it gives us great pleasure to prick this balloon with the pin of knowledge you had all along. These different characters with their distinct unique personalities are like the average man. Like the man with exactly the average height, weight, hair and nose-length - who doesn't exist.

These customers - yours and mine, are heuristics, short-cuts, simplifications - and just that.

What we really should be talking about, and thinking about - are different need-states. In one need-state, a customer prefers my shop and in another, my competitor's. That's really what it is.

If my eCommerce platform, for example, is great for technology products and not so great for lifestyle products, the same customer, in the lifestyle need-state is my competitor's customer and when in the technology frame-of-mind, is my customer. A frequent misread of this state is as follows: my customer is a technology buyer and the competitor's is a lifestyle buyer. Familiar?

So what?

A lot of things. Just as a starting example, do you think segmenting users or customers makes more sense now or segmenting need-states, use-cases or states-of-mind? Litmus - think of yourself, are you ever just one brand's customer?

Are you building a Concorde?

All of us know about the concorde - sorry, let me correct myself - about Concorde, right? You have to get it right, so I hear.

So here's what happened, broadly.

An Anglo-French JV (Aérospatiale and the British Aircraft Corporation) built Concorde, a supersonic passenger plane (out of two ever built) that halved transatlantic flight-times, a proposition that'll still sell if you were to poll potential passengers today. It flew for 27 years but only 20 aircrafts were built. While there are multiple theories on its efficacy, it is known as a supreme technological feat. It is also known that it never made money. Finally after the one accident it had, and in face of mounting losses, the program was shut in 2003. This was despite Government subsidies and sponsorship, despite the muscle of Aérospatiale and BAC, but importantly, despite a very strong consumer proposition – halving transatlantic time, the hype value of flying cutting-edge etc.

Or was it? Was it really a strong value proposition? I'm not an expert there, I've not seen the value-prop, but I assume that while it was undeniably good for the customers to half their flying time, maybe it wasn't important enough to pay the ticket price premium. Why I say this because had it not been the case, I assume other supersonic passenger jets would have been built.

What is known is that costs spiraled to 6 times the initial estimate. For perspective it was $ 23mn. Note, in 1977 dollars. Post retirement, Branson offered to buy British Airways’ Concorde planes, first offering their nominal original price of £1 each, then increasing the offer to £1 million each. Note, this is in 2003 pounds.

Also quoted is the fact that the big reason behind Concorde's grounding, apart from the cited reasons of the 4590 crash, fuel cost etc, was that it was more profitable to carry passengers at subsonic speeds.

The existence of technology, and a thumbs-up from potential customers sometimes blinds us into confusing these things as a 'buy-in'. Today, a faster website, faster delivery, better packing, better consumer service will all be things that a customer wants. Without a sensitivity curve along all the value-prop axes, however, these are all directional and that's all. What we should be researching is how many customers will pay what it takes to get these desirables on the table. What we should also do is check if there's a margin buffer between original price and a post-spiral price for long development projects.


I'm never against cool technologies. I love them. I'm genuinely sad to see Pandora, Wikipedia and WorldSpace bleed. Maybe not wiki - they made a choice not to make ad-money, but WorldSpace was in it to make money. Customers loved it. Just not enough customers maybe, not enough love perhaps, not enough love to pay. This is an important litmus for those of us in the In Tech industries especially, it is common to see over-spec-ed products. It's an engineer's / designer's self-actualization, but let’s remember all that is useless if there aren't enough people who pay for those specs.

What do you think?

Social Recommendations, Discover-ability of the Truly New, and the Aha!

I'm sure you see a lot of "people who bought this also bought this" or "people who read..." or "friends who listened..." or "friends who watched...." nowadays on sites. That is social recommendation for a lot of businesses. The assumptions are clear. We are sheep. No, that sounds bad, but we're some similar creatures.

I kind-of agree. Most of us are not early adopters, and we seek sanction in the actions of other people. Why should we try untested waters unless we know people who jump in them come out alive, or better, enjoy it? The friends part makes even more logical sense. If we're sheep, we follow sheep and now flies. We make friends based on some commonality, and if my friends like something, maybe I like it too. Better chance than trying out a product none of my friends like. Right?

Yes, except that most of us are also unique. Sometimes, actually most of the times, we are sheep. But some times we are deliberately not. We don't want to wear the same shirt as everyone else. We also try to be different. We want to seek our own New. We want the thrill of being the first to discover something cool which then, other people also like. Some times we want to hold on to what we discover and don't want others to know about the small cozy cafe we discovered because once they do, it'll stay neither small nor cozy. Also if you think about it from the other perspective, that of someone / something wanting to be discovered, you have a terrible cold-start chicken-egg problem.

No one knows you, no one likes you, so no one follows any one to your door. Seems like a dead-end.

Not on the Music Genome Project, not on Pandora.

Anyone who's used Pandora is a fan, or I haven't had the fortune to come across any other type. Pandora is a radio-station for those who still don't know, that will ask you for a couple of songs you like and then will go on to predict, based on what you like and what you skip, to progressively suggest songs that you love, but have never heard of. Pandora doesn't do the 'like' business. The Music Genome Project, in the background, describes each new song, through an algorithm on about 400 attributes (genes), and each new song is rated by a musician on those attributes again, and that is what it uses matches to match your taste. This means that if Pandora has figured out what kind of music you like, and there's someone who's written a song like that, you discover it, hear it, love it - without ever needing to hear about the band, or the genre, or the country or century it was written in - and without any of your friends having heard of it. For those who can (it's legally available only in US / AU / NZ I think), you must try it for genuine aha moments.

What I find even more amazing is that this stuff is possible in as complex a realm as music. What I find amusing, however, it how much simpler it might be for, say, books - and you don't see this happening. T-Shirt fans could be following the herd in styles and trying to stand out a bit in terms of the slogan, but book fans really look for that unheard of book that gives them the aha.

Recap, recommendations work. Social also works. Attribute-based cataloging also works. There are categories (like the undiscovered), and occasions (imagine gifting someone what everyone else is gifting), and people (the cult of the non-conformists) for whom a Pandora of things is a crying need.

It is more difficult to build this out, but this could be well worth its while. I'm sure, at least hoping, that there is stuff being built as we speak.