
The sudden death of the website? - helloworld
https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/13/the-sudden-death-of-the-website/
======
Klathmon
This seems... Very out of touch.

The author makes the argument that all websites look the same because of
Google, but never really gives a reason why... (besides name dropping
"PageRank" once)

Then it goes on to say that same experience (or more accurately the lack of a
"unique" experience) is why they have poor conversion rates.

Then it blames the website for causing an increased spending in customer
service, pointing to this as the reason why they think brands will start
"closing" their websites.

But every step of the way I think the author is way off. Websites don't look
like that because Google's "PageRank" is forcing them to somehow, and that
look and feel isn't the reason why conversions are bad.

In my opinion, websites look like that because a useful website follows some
guidelines, and that may make it look "bland" but at least I know to look for
my "cart" at the top-right of the page (or even have the concept of a "cart").

Also, I think the reason why conversions are bad is because retailers looked
at the web for years as an afterthought. The reason only a handful of large
companies are doing well on the web is because so few treated it as well as
they treat their storefronts. You can't treat the internet as an afterthought,
you need to build your business around it. Amazon, eBay, Overstock, and others
have done this, they spent the time, money, and engineering to do it right,
and do it fast. Someone like Nike throws something slow and cumbersome to use
together as an afterthought just to have one.

If websites start closing, it's not because of the "big bad google", it's
because ecommerce is hard, just like how some online-only or online-first
companies are now finding out how hard brick-and-mortar really is.

~~~
pascalxus
I think your absolutely right. The vast majority of UIs are okay and get the
job done. I've rarely not ordered something because the UI was too bad.

But, I have to admit, the author is right on one account. Alot of websites
these days are lurching from one page to another, just to score more page
views or something, rather than a Single page app.

And, I hope goolge doesn't think their done with search. Google doesn't always
do a great job of ranking the best products and sites at the top. Sometimes
it's downright awful. On a number of occassions, I've had to click through
each of the first 10 results and the next 10 and still not finding exactly
what i want. And, I've found that if google can't find it in the top 20, it
usually doesn't find it in the next 20 either. But, I'm sure it exists
somewhere.

~~~
cheschire
Relevant results for me have gotten a lot harder to find in the last several
months. I believe this is since they switched over to neural networking
instead of algorithms, but I’m not inside enough to know if this really
happened.

I get a lot of queries now where the first few results are missing at least
one of my terms. I have to scroll before I find my first result that doesn’t
say it’s missing a term.

I don’t think google is done with their search, but I have a feeling they’re
going through a major transition right now and a lot of the web is still
designed for old SEO models.

~~~
themodelplumber
You're right on. I've found it useful to typologize my searches to take
advantage of specialty information portals. For example I use NIH for medical,
MDN for webdev, specific subreddits or forums for other projects. This helps
counterbalance the currently weakened global search (Google) outcomes.

------
kaoD
I don't want conversations. I want information. If the info is already missing
in a web page I fail to see how a virtual salesperson saying "well, I don't
know" is going to sell better.

Case in point: I'm cleaning up a house to live in and we need a new kitchen
sink. The problem is there was already one there so we want to buy a
replacement that is bigger than the current cut out in the counter and also
fits nicely with the pipe installation.

Searching for a sink online has been a nightmare: if there are schematics
(which are often missing) there is always some key information left out like
the depth of the bowl.

This includes the king of online retail: Amazon lists package size and nothing
else. When was the last time the package size influenced your purchase?

Buying in person hasn't been much better and the prices are almost double! At
least I can bring my measuring tape and do the schematics myself, though I
still hate getting pitched by salespeople that often know much less than me
after a 20-min online research.

In the end we're going for the cheapest one that has a reasonable return
policy. Who cares about the more expensive ones if, for all I know, the only
difference is their aesthetics?

This is such a common pattern I started dreading buying online. I'm tired of
hunting for the specs on Google. That's the shop's only job!

IMHO the article is nothing more than an advertisement for the author's
business. Maybe he's sure of the paradigm shift but I'm definitely not because
an actually useful conversational assistant requires both competence, effort
and, more importantly, exposes the seller to risks (official information =
contractual obligation, which is IMHO the reason you will not get the answers
IRL or via customer support either).

------
koverda
Not buying it from this guy.

He says things are going to move to conversational commerce? Alexa at best can
re-order something that I've bought before. If I need a new product, the
amount of information and comparison that I do (as well as checking reviews)
doesn't lead well to a conversational model.

It's not like we walk into a B&M store and just talk to a salesperson. We
examine the products, the packaging, the information presented about those
products, we look around near by and see what else in a similar category is in
the store.

Conversational commerce moves to an even lower bandwidth information transfer.
With websites we can absorb way more info than we can with a chat bot. At best
it will augment current experiences.

Maybe I'm wrong, and there are some products that are well suited to this
model, but I'm failing to come up with any.

~~~
OtterCoder
I _hate_ conversations when I'm shopping. If a chipper salesperson walks over
and starts chatting me up or making small talk, I will immediately turn around
and walk out, and I'm an extrovert. I want to look at price, price per
unit/spec, hold the thing if quality is relevant, then make a purchase. The
less you pitch to me, the more likely I'll buy.

~~~
dazc
'I will immediately turn around and walk out...'

I worked in retail over 20 years ago and this is one of the first lessons I
learned. If somebody wants help making a buying decision they will, usually,
come and ask for it.

If you let someone look around and walk out without bothering them they'll
often come back later and buy something. It may be in the next hour or the
next week or the next month but (assuming you have something people want) they
do come back.

I'm not saying completely ignore them, a simple 'hello' or 'how's it going?'
will suffice.

If they don't ever come back the place has got bigger problems than the
salesman can fix.

Of course there are exceptions where people are pressured into buying
something they didn't want to buy. They're the outliers that drive this kind
of perverse retail policy. But you can guarantee these people only ever buy
once.

Some of this is applicable to e-commerce today. Annoying chat boxes, false
discounting and time limited offers are just another way of forcing a sale at
the cost of building a long-term relationship.

------
dwheeler
This is a nonsense ad for someone's services. I don't want websites to work
totally differently from each other, nor does anyone else. Instead, I want to
be able to find the information that I want, or be able to quickly acquire the
services I want. There's a false premise about brick-and-mortar stores here
too. Brick-and-mortar stores aren't radically different from each other
either,; I expect doors to look like doors, windows to look like windows, and
when I look for the bathroom I should be able to figure out how to use it. The
notion that every website has to look radically different from each other is
nonsense from people who are too excited about making new designs instead of
wanting to help other people. Let's let's have fewer fads and more thinking
about people, please.

~~~
FussyZeus
The author I'm pretty sure never even mentioned trust, which is a big reason I
stick to Amazon. You never know who on earth or what hackneyed system is on
the other end of a credit card form. I like the fact that Amazon lets me order
with my voice, and I like the fact that Amazon lets me order from any number
of millions of merchants without fear of my credit card getting stolen (or at
least, less fear than usual). The few times I checkout at other random
websites I _always_ use PayPal to avoid giving away valuable info.

------
mattlondon
I'd argue that conversational interfaces for retail would only be good for
standardised commodities - 6 medium hens eggs, a pack of 10 M6 screws, a ream
of A4 paper etc - i.e. stuff that you don't care about the brand or specifics,
you just need some eggs etc.

Websites could do A LOT better by concentrating on putting better product info
on their site: proper _high res_ pictures from multiple angles (e.g. for
products in boxes, show me every side of the box that I can zoom in and read
the text on), descriptions that aren't just copy-paste marketing B.S., and
proper measurements/sizes/specifications. That'd go a long way toward reducing
confused shoppers having to call a help centre...

Personally, if I have to talk to someone at a store (online or not), they've
already started to annoy me. I just want to get my stuff then carry on with
the more important things in life.

Plus what is it about chatbots that is getting people so excited? Anyone that
has an Alexa or Google home will tell you they are frustrating and irritating
to use and a long way away from doing anything useful apart from trivial stuff
like setting kitchen timers or stilted and excruciatingly awkward question-
answer settings.

------
Wehrdo
It seems like this guy is trying to advocate for conversational interfaces
(what a surprise, given his company). They were all the rage 1-2 years ago,
and I think right now we're probably in the "Trough of disillusionment" in the
Hype Cycle. I wonder if the author is simply behind everyone else on the curve
and harboring unrealistic expectations, or truly sees where that technology
will fit into our lives. Given his prediction of a "major website" shutting
down this year, I would lean more towards disillusionment.

I think many are coming to the conclusion that proper natural language
understanding will require more than just a deep feed-forward network with
back-propagation.

------
t0mbstone
Google didn't kill e-commerce. Amazon killed it. People are sick of creating
accounts on every single web site out there. Who wants to enter your credit
card info on some random web site? How do you know if you can trust them? And
then, when you do successfully place an order, you end up having to pay
shipping and handling, and it doesn't come for two weeks. Compare that to one
click shopping on amazon.com, and one-day free shipping. Independent
e-commerce sites just can't compete with that.

~~~
dingaling
In no country does Amazon have more than 40% online market share and in many
it is far lower; 16% in the UK for example.

Other retailers can compete on many aspects; for example in the UK Amazon is
completely locked-out of online groceries by the big supermarkets. Or hobby
specialists who know their market well, a UK example being Hannants who work
closely with the model-kit industry.

And most other retailers don't require an annual fee for decent service, such
as dispatching within a week...

~~~
dazc
'in the UK Amazon is completely locked-out of online groceries by the big
supermarkets.'

Last year I was due to return from Spain on Christmas eve. Tesco, Waitrose,
etc were not accepting any orders for about 3 days before. I had no such
problems with amazon.

I think it will be a while before I buy groceries on a regular basis from
amazon but I wouldn't be surprised if I was in 5 years time?

'And most other retailers don't require an annual fee for decent service, such
as dispatching within a week...'

Yeah, I get that 'preparing for dispatch' bull sometimes too and it is quite
annoying. Sometimes cancelling and re-ordering fixes it but you have to be
quick before the window shuts.

------
dsign
What this guy says makes no sense whatsoever... for anybody that knows a
peanut about the matter. But he is speaking to business types, and among
those, technical knowledge is less prevalent. Probably he wants to start
another meme infection of "the web is going to die" among investors and
business analysts...

------
550r
It doesn't seem that long there were plenty of people predicting that mobile
apps were also going to render websites obsolete, but that didn't really
happen, at least nothing like the extent that was predicted. In fact most of
the main app only experiences like instagram have ended up creating web
interfaces anyway.

Maybe it will eventually happen but this article predicts some major brands
shutting down their websites this year, which is like saying cryptocurrencies
will start replacing cash in some major western countries this year. The only
real value I can see in a brand shutting down it's website for a chatbot only
service right now is the the free publicity they will get for doing so.
Websites are normally relatively cheap to run so there is no real reason to
kill them off unless it's getting no traffic compared to the chatbot channels
and from my own experiences in this area, chatbots aren't even close to
website use yet (but I am in Australia, where things like Alexa and Google
Home are quite new in the market compared to the US).

------
davemel37
I think everyone is thinking about chatbots and conversational interfaces
backwards.

Consumers should be the ones building chatbots to talk to brands not vice
versa. The brands can use NLP and AI to partially automate much of the
conversation, but it needs to be consumer driven... too much of the promise of
chatbots requires breaking down barriers and as long as brands control their
own experience and every bot is siloed, the real pain of consumers and current
ecommerce wont be solved...

Too much of technology today is focused on optimizing businesses and ends up
the end users.

Online advertising is a protection racket where publishers steal and hold
customers hostage and sell them to the highest bidder...all the middleware is
optimized around grabbing your piece of the advertising pie without caring
about the end users or the advertisers...in the meantime, its just driving up
costs to deliver value...

We need a buyer driven market...we need long term visionaries who stop
optimizing to business revenue and cost savings and optimize to GROWING THE
OVERALL MARKET!!! optimize to what really serves customers and advertisers
instead of these short aighted plays solving problems the previous startup
created...

We wouldnt need facebook ads if our competitors werent reaching our customers
on google and we wouldnt need content marketing if publishers actually tried
to serve advertisers instead of just trying to drive up their costs...

These companies are thinking about everything backwards imho.

~~~
lsc
>Consumers should be the ones building chatbots to talk to brands not vice
versa.

There was a lot of sci-fi ish talk, back in the day, about 'agents' or 'smart
personal agents' or thinks like that; where we'd all have a team of semi-
intelligent bots that would go off and do things on our behalf.

It's interesting that we kinda have some of this now, but as you say, it's
reversed; the agents are owned by the company that is trying to sell us
something, so rather than negotiating for us, they negotiate against us.

------
Animats
Some commerce sites do have complicated problems. Ones where there are size
and color options, but not all sizes and color combinations are available,
have user interface problems.

Car parts sites are getting good. They mostly now take the make and model of
your car, and then give you a site that only shows items for that model.

Industrial parts sites, especially for electronics, range from excellent to
terrible. They have huge catalogs of very specific parts, and you need a
specialized search engine to navigate them. Those things are not
conversational; they're table driven.

~~~
perl4ever
I am finding that for many things, there is someone who's occupied a niche
with a great website and catalog, and looking for the same stuff on Amazon or
eBay will turn up mediocrity, garbage, or nothing.

But if you don't do some research on the specs of what you want to buy, you
easily get funneled into Amazon.

For instance, I wanted a cable for my printer. If I look on Amazon for XYZ
printer cable, they will happily sell me one. It's very easy to find
_something_ when you do a simple minded search.

But actually, it is a generic cable, and Amazon's listings have simply been
spammed with every printer model name in creation.

When I realized that, I went to a site that specializes in cables, and looked
for a product based on the connector types. Doing that gave me real choices
(such as the cable length, whether it has a ferrite core, etc.), detailed
specs, and on top of that, much cheaper prices.

The specific retailer or specialty doesn't matter - my point is that I am
getting into (and advocate) the mindset that when I want something and it's
not available locally, I start by thinking "I know _someone_ is making a
living by outdoing Amazon in a particular niche - how can I find their
website?" Other random examples include chocolate and kitchen equipment.

The effectiveness of Amazon as a baseline means, I think, that anyone with a
thriving online business has to be something special these days.

------
jschwartzi
Try buying a pair of pants that you like through a "conversational interface,"
and then get back to me when you figure out what the problem is.

------
fireismyflag
>As Google made it easier to find the world’s information, it also started to
dictate the rules through the PageRank algorithm, which forced companies to
design their websites in a certain way

Page rank is not dictated by website design, and it's not the reason many
websites share the same components... UX is, we have found the proven path and
following it makes it easier for our users.

Los of other valuable criticism in the site's own comments as well...

------
georgeoliver
Less than 15% of direct sales is through ecommerce, but I'd bet a good
fraction of RL dollars spent is a direct result of an app or website.

------
osrec
A bold prediction. Don't think it'll come true. I do think that the way we
discover answers to our questions online will change though. I'm not saying
Google's days are numbered, but it's about time we saw some additional
innovation in this space. Google has this underlying requirement to
continually bolster ad revenue before releasing tech, and I feel this actually
stifles it's ability to innovate in the search space...

------
GedByrne
Alexa is still struggling to understand what Album I want to listen to from my
rather limited music library.

She won’t be replacing the Amazon website anytime soon.

------
hrasyid
> The brand will shift how it connects with consumers — to conversations, with
> a combination of bots and humans, through a messaging front end like SMS or
> Facebook. We are already working with several large brands to make this a
> reality.

This is arguably happening in third world countries. At least in Indonesia
(which I'm familiar with), a lot of new businesses don't bother with websites
but relied on things like Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp (coincidentally
these are own by the same guy) to reach out to customers and get orders.

~~~
b1daly
In such a purchase flow model, where are customers placing their orders?
Meaning, are they driving traffic to a general ecommerce site like Amazon?

~~~
hrasyid
No, just via chat/PM

------
majormajor
I'm not sure companies will forgo websites entirely, but "dumb" websites is a
trend I think will continue. I doubt many people do anything on the Snapchat
website, for instance.

I expect media to continue to move to TVs and dedicated apps, and the reasons
outlined by the author for commerce to move away from the open web are
somewhat convincing, as well. Looking at my own behavior, I usually search
Amazon before Google when I want to buy something - take that trend further
and searching the web, vs searching an app store, becomes less and less
important for business.

In the happy version of this scenario, the web returns to being a great place
for text and knowledge storage. There will be ads as long as there are
eyeballs, but if the number of eyeballs drops again, does the reason to create
clickbait and other purely-ad/eyeball-driven "content" drop too?

But compared to the author, I think it has a lot more to do with phones and
devices, and the needs to create experiences aimed at them, than Google. Who
wants to sit on the couch with a laptop instead of an iPad? Who wants to use a
mobile website instead of a dedicated app? Even what looks like a super-thin
wrapper (the Amazon app) is still a nicer experience than using amazon.com on
a tablet or phone.

------
localcdn
Who do I get in touch with to subtly promote my company with a piece on
TechCrunch?

~~~
dsign
Judging by the article, they don't do "subtly".

------
manmal
When it comes to e-Commerce, maybe we should rather listen to people who are
actually managing a store. Tony Hsieh of Zappos has written a wonderful book
about customer care, and it all boils down to getting in touch with the
customer as MUCH as possible. Everytime a customer calls in, that’s a chance
for you to create a positive experience for them, and they are more likely to
become repeat customers. Without this, you become interchangeable. The very
moment Amazon is superseded by another retailer with similar prices and return
policy, I will change to them - I feel no loyalty towards them. That’s not the
case with my local supermarket, where I know all the cashiers and there is
this feeling of personal familiarity.

So phone calls are not necessarily the problem - maybe digital sales
automation is the problem.

~~~
Animats
_Tony Hsieh of Zappos has written a wonderful book about customer care, and it
all boils down to getting in touch with the customer as MUCH as possible._

He runs a shoe store. I never, ever, want a shoe store to "get in touch" with
me.

~~~
manmal
Customers get in touch with Zappos, not vice versa. But Zappos don't consider
this a nuisance, but as a chance to wow the customer.

------
anfilt
This article is verges a bit much the ad side for the author. However, part me
like the idea of a lot fluffy commerce stuff leaving the internet and it just
being a giant library of information. However, that's not happening especially
since a lot commerce websites also post information. I also don't see how chat
functionality would cause such a shift? If you are wanting to reduce the
amount questions your website is generating maybe add more content to it. I
hate how so many "modern designed" websites are so light on information. They
just end up as fancy brochures with little to no information. Give me data
sheets, give me all the details I could possible want about your product/s.

~~~
b1daly
I’ve assumed the trend away from high content websites was driven by the need
for responsive, phone friendly sites. There is so little screen real estate
available, that design considerations lead to these websites that are a big
pretty picture, with a little bit of marketing fluff text.

------
bsder
The most fascinating thing from that article, to me, is the fact that a
website creates _MORE_ phone traffic, not less.

That seems like an interesting wedge for some company that actually cares
about customer service.

~~~
bewo001
Phone traffic on the whole has peaked recently, at least in western countries.
If websites caused more calls, this should not have happened.

~~~
jacksmith21006
I seriously doubt that is true and would love to see a source? I do supect it
has slowed but hard to image that data used by mobile does not continue to
increase until or unless something replaces phones.

Data plan continue to get cheaper and areas with data increase and speeds
increase all point to increased use.

I know now when I have to sit around waiting for my kids to finish practice I
am using data like I never used before. We now have YouTube TV and I might
catch up in the news as I wait instead of reading a book. Btw, love YouTube
TV. Best Google product there is.

~~~
bewo001
It's about telephony traffic, not data traffic from phones.

Some national regulators publish the numbers every year.
[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/past-point-peak-telephony-
dea...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/past-point-peak-telephony-dean-bubley)
has some discussion and links.

------
z3t4
Yeh, well organised (library like) online stores suck. I rather buy my stuff
by communicating with a sales person via SMS messages ...

------
sunseb
Remember how hard we had to fight pop-ups back in the good old days ? I find
funny that this guy is selling this exact idea.

------
EngineerBetter
As someone who remembers the usability horrors of the 90s as wr stumbled our
way to figuring out what worked, I think the author is misidentifying the
issue. Websites work just fine now - the issue is Amazon having an economy of
scale and business model whereby they almost all other e-commerce sites are an
irrelevance.

------
pedalpete
Off topic, but does the $500B total global advertising spend sound wrong to
anybody else? I'm seeing reports of that number, but that seems incredibly low
to me.

Google made $95B in advertising revenue in 2017, can they really be almost
1/5th of the entire global advertising spend?

------
astura
So the hypothesis is that every website looks the same thanks to Google yet,
at the same time, nobody can figure out how to use these identical websites so
everyone gets on the phone to do business.

That's not matched my personal experience, to say the least

------
leeoniya
there's something to be said about a _predictable_ experience. no one needs
checkout buttons on the left and mystery meat navigation [1] for the sake of
being unique. i personally don't want a MySpace or Geocities shopping
experience. brick and mortar stores are also not _that_ different for the same
reason.

our avg purchase online is $500 and a phone purchase avg is closer to $1,000.
we're happy when customers call so we can further differentiate ourselves from
our competitors.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation)

~~~
bsder
And yet the mystery meat hamburger menu is now the standard on mobile.

~~~
leeoniya
unfortunate, but it's more-or-less known/standard now.

------
pif
1 - HTML was meant for static content and e-commerce never was about static
content. Wow, who could have thought about this?

2 - Humans like human conversation. Oh, the biggest surprise!

Jeez, I learnt two things today!

------
vikingcaffiene
I call BS. The authors predictions are based upon the assertion that people
would rather make a phone call than use a website. I acknowledge that maybe I
am in a bubble and don't understand the average user but, really?? It seems
pretty commonplace for people in my generation (xennial) and those after mine
to go out of their way to _avoid_ the phone. I will _always_ use an online
communication method if I can.

If the argument was that some new tech was coming to blow websites out of the
water I could at least try to give it the benefit of the doubt. That's not the
premise here and, much like email, many have tried to replace websites. All
fail.

~~~
rossdavidh
I am 50 years old, and I also will only resort to phone call as a last resort,
when just going to a different website instead is not an option, so I think
your point applies not only to youngsters.

~~~
vikingcaffiene
I was thinking that maybe the author was coming from a place that was out of
touch because of coming from a different time but I didn't mean to generalize
an entire age group with that. I apologize if that's the way it came off. The
bigger point here is that phone calls suck and we all agree. :-)

------
kyledrake
> I am going to make a bold prediction: In 2018, we will see the first major
> brand shut down its website.

If that was a bet, I would put $50,000 down on it not happening.

