Matthew Mengerink, Vice President and General Manager of Platform , X.Commerce-eBay Inc. & Robert Scoble, American Blogger, Technical Evangelist and Author,Rackspace
People don’t want to appear to be idiotic when they buy things. Mathew builds storefronts for retailers, what trends is he seeing. For merchants, the storefront is a stressful place, but it does not have the human touch that actual stores have. The social element is coming back into digital, When you go there, you get recognised. It becomes more vibrant. Mobile phones is making this possible in an actual store. With Etsy, they have put Facebook in there, that shows what your friends like. The social network influence is more important than any other ratings.
Since last year, Groupon has gone public, there are lots of other offer based systems. Where is location going here? Matthew thinks commerce is cool again; putting inventory into phones is a great opportunity. You can be walking down the street and let people know what the offers are through the phone. You can program a city.
They are announcing things. Paypal access is added to Magento stores…it is a commerce operating system, plenty of partners etc.
Looking at consumer behaviours, standing in line and waiting is an old concept. Now with apple, each sales rep can take payment. There is an explosion of apps in this space, adding onto the ipad etc. The POS systems are constraining and making the need for diverse systems. They are looking at the human touch, how can they let the staff know who you are, what you want, know more about you. SO staff can give you customised offers, based on your social network.
This is an open platform, bringing people together, opening up APIs etc…giving commerce in the cloud. Merchants want to buy tech…give them an app store to get tech into the stores. Retails stores, don’t have the tech at the moment, don’t have the expertise to build it out. SO how is this team going to help them? So x.com is a meeting place for developers and merchants. There are large number of requirements listing. They are working at taking the data and providing the best stuff for the merchants.
Is NFC a worry, or an opp? It’s seen as an opportunity. There’s a bunch of people working on this, at looking at a platform approach. It will look different in different approaches.
x.com is looking at making every screen a chance for commerce at making it more fun, putting the experience there. Ebay looks forward to an exciting world for consumers.
