One of the classes I teach at Seneca College is Virtual Fashion Retailing. It's a course I was given much latitude in shaping, and this is my second year teaching it. The students are all sixth semester students, and my mug is one of the last they'll see before heading off into the Wild West of the fashion industry. Technology changes rapidly in every field, and this includes e-tailing. With that in mind, I'd like to talk about some current trends in e-Commerce, then putting my 'fortune telling' hat on--and clearly, tongue-in-cheek--predict the future of electronic retailing.
E-commerce stands for electronic commerce. Electronic commerce is basically defined as the buying and selling of electronic goods and/or services over the Internet. Many brick-and-mortar (i.e., real) stores turned to e-Commerce early on, and are now called multi-channel retailers. Multi-channel retailers sell their goods or services in more than one way.
So the course I teach includes things like a brief history of e-Commerce, various classifications of retailers, the pros and cons of e-tailing, and, a fairly large component: the creation of a mock-up online store.
As I got started this year, I noted two interesting trends. One concerned a collection of products that not only sold well in the depths of the recession, but actually increased its sales (the merchandise included high end skin care and anti-aging products). The other trend was that some big-name retailers were beginning not only to target mobile phone users, but to actually develop marketing expressly for cell and smartphones. I thought, well, this is in keeping with reality. More and more, people are turning to smartphones for everything from social networking to televised events. So why not more commerce? This emerging and growing market is now referred to as "m-commerce". Of course!
In thinking about these interesting developments, I decided to don my 'fortune-telling' hat and peer, rather fearlessly, into the future of technology and commerce to see what's just around the corner...
Cloudy, at first, but then from the mists of the future the following name appeared: "r-commerce". I, too, thought it meant radio commerce. But the word spelled itself out and I found out it meant ... retina-commerce. Wow, thought I: they're going to target our eyeballs! The images didn't stay with me long enough to figure out exactly how this would work, but it seems it had something to do with 3-D images being projected onto our retinas, and ... well, I lost the signal. I wondered how they'd work sound into it.
Many were the images of futuristic marketing and advertising that appeared to me--some for but a second, others long enough for me to grasp their meaning. The last clear trend I saw happening came to me, again, as a word: "si-commerce". What the heck? Visions of Star Trek and other far-away and fantastic worlds began to bombard my consciousness. I couldn't for the life of me figure out the "si" part at first. I thought it might be "science", or "significant insight", or any number of other things. And then the words cleared up. This new marketing technique would involve subcutaneous implants. Wow! So in the future we'll have advertising chips implanted under our skin, and they'll deliver data directly to our bloodstream. Fantastic. Hmmm, I wondered aloud, how will they figure out a way to make us pay a monthly subscription for that? And what kind of bank machine or debit system will that entail?
The visions stopped, I took off my fortune-telling hat, and saw my laptop sitting on the dining room table. It was all a bad dream, or was it? e-Commerce and m-commerce are re ... sorry, hang on a second, I need to grab a phone call coming in somewhere in my shoulder.
