

Startup idea for you: Modern e-commerce isn't enough - tibbon
http://tibbon.com/e-commerce-isnt-enough.html

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retube
We tried to do exactly that a couple of years ago. I've no doubt lots of
others have tried, it's not an original idea. The problems associated with it
are legion though. The vast majority of small or independent stores have no
electronic inventory system. Lots of store owners we spoke to didn't even know
what they had in stock, or have a list (electronic or paper) of what they had
in stock. And it's these smaller stores which actually make such a service
truly valuable. And don't forget - there are thousands, 100s of 1000s of them.
getting them all on board is nigh-on impossible.

Many the small stores we visited had thousands of items for sale. The job of
itemising them is, for a small business, just too expensive and/or time
consuming. Additionally most of these owners were absolutely hopeless with
technology - they couldn't even upload a csv (what's a csv file?) with a
simple web form. Many of them didn't have, nor want a website. It's out of
their realm of knowledge or understanding, and they have no desire, in fact
often an aggressive rejection of, adopting new technologies.

Couple that with the costs involved, they are simply not interested, whatever
the business case.

This isn't going to happen by virtue of an active sales drive. This is only
going to happen passively over the next 10 - 20 years as more stores get
unified cash register/inventory systems - and then only if such systems
provide a common or standard api for web or mobile platforms to hook into. And
this in itself is a huge problem - there is no dominent player in the cash
register/inventory business - just hundreds of little guys with no common
standards.

It's a nice idea and would be wonderful. But it's just too big a project to
make a reality.

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icefox
Even that big players can't track there own stock. Recently I wanted a toy at
toys-r-us, but found out the only way to get it was to call every local store
once a day until someone had it in stock. I paid the scalper fee and bought it
on ebay. Similarly I wanted to rent a specific (more expensive) car with Avis.
The only way to do it was to click on each office, put in my dates and see
what they had, one by one. There was absolutely no way to search for a car to
find out where it was or would be. I ended up just renting the cheapo car. You
would think tracking your inventory would be a solved problem in this day in
age for a company of either of these sizes.

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patio11
You'd be gobsmacked how many big companies totally missed the boat on core,
defining technologies, due to failure of vision, switching costs, or just
belief that it did not matter for them. Hopefully they will be made into
lunchmeat by their competitors, but that is not a law of nature.

There are banks that still require humans to make credit decisions with $2,000
of maximum risk to the bank. There are airlines where rebooking a ticket
requires getting three humans together on a telephone call. There are
retailers who do not know how much of their bestselling product is on the
shelves. There are retailers who do not know what their bestselling product is
right now, but who can give you a pretty good guess two weeks from now. There
are e-commerce companies who do not do A/B testing yet. There are newspapers
who do not SEO. There are publishers who think that paper is the future of
their industry. The list goes on and and and on.

~~~
tibbon
Additionally, there are still businesses that use 3-column ledger paper for
their books, write all receipts manually, accept cash only, have no web
presence at all (of their own), and use mechanical cash registers.
Unfortunately, the presence of technology does not always mean adoption of
technology even if the benefits seem crystal clear to most others.

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Poiesis
This seems to me to be ("simply") a failure of marketing. If you can
demonstrate value, then you would generally be a deployed solution. But you
have to get that message out there, and if your target market is stuck in the
stone age SEO isn't really going to be quite as helpful.

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evandavid
This is a kind of obvious problem to approach, but as people here have
mentioned, it would be extremely difficult (milo are trying, as have others).
An idea I had once upon a time was that you could essentially solve it by
building a kick ass point-of-sale and inventory management software system
that customers are able to use for free, provided that they're happy to have
their goods indexed on a location aware product search engine. Needless to
say, that is still an extremely difficult challenge. I've got a feeling these
guys might attempt it at some point: www.vendhq.com

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tbgvi
Agreed, it is a difficult challenge. I know because I'm working on it right
now with my company, Cashier Live. We've thought about doing something like
this in addition to working with options out there like Milo or Google's local
product search, but it leads to the same problem they have now. Comprehensive
search. If I (or VendHQ) did something like that, we'd only have independent
stores and not the large chains.

That being said, I think Milo knows their weakness is in independent retail
and it looks like they're taking steps to solve that.

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mgkimsal
Something which wasn't mentioned here is that many retailers don't want you to
know - they want you to come in to the store. If _all_ of the retailers have
you come in to the store, there's an effective block on this sort of thing
working.

Also, many retailers have "we'll honor competing prices on things but only if
they're in stock" policies. This would make it too easy for people to play
retailer X off retailer Y.

I noticed on milo.com that most of the items I looked for "might" be in stock.
Well, of course they _might_ be - I still need to call/drive.

A different approach would be a push - let me push out what I'm looking for,
and have competing retailers contact me with replies. Have the service cost a
bit for retailers to use - not a lot, but something to prevent rampant
spamming. Build in location, so retailers are only getting requests from
people in the area, and have retailers use the system on a regular basis. Just
like someone should check voicemail every few minutes (30?) someone could
check serviceX, and reply if they have the item in stock with the price,
terms, etc. "Click here to hold the item from company Y for 2 days" etc.

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AndrewS
Sounds like reverse auctions. Rather than people competing to buy an item on
sale, sellers would be bidding to sell a wanted item. Does anyone do this?
Would it actually work?

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mgkimsal
yeah, and this idea has been tried for more than a decade in various forms. To
make it work, having a twitter-like approach, with location included, and
having stores actually using it, that would take off (potentially). The diff
now from 1999 is tech is cheaper, more pervasive, and mobile.

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akozak
The main challenge would be to convince business owners to publish data about
their stock to the web. The rest should be easy.

~~~
jfarmer
No, the main challenge is calling every mom & pop store and getting them
indexed. You are also unlikely to convince a mom & pop store to do any extra
work, especially if it involves something they don't understand (computers).

There's a reason Milo is starting with big-box and national retailers.

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jfarmer
I thought you were saying that business owners would be reluctant to share
their data,e.g., for privacy or competitive reasons, versus:

1\. The difficulty and expense associated with calling and converting smaller
retailers

2\. The amount of effort required by smaller retailers to integrate with your
system coupled with the fact that smaller retailers are technologically lazy
and don't readily understand the benefits of integrating

The "easiest" way might be to replace their inventory systems yourself, for
example. This is more-or-less what OpenTable did.

~~~
akozak
No, I meant for all of those reasons, not any one. I'm sure there would be a
wide variety of reasons a business wouldn't want to publish data. You're right
to draw them out into separate worries.

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ImperatorLunae
I thought about trying to do this for something like groceries, but grocery
stores don't list all their prices in an accessible manner.

I don't think they want to, either. Every grocery store, I'm sure, calculates
how much they can discount some items to draw you into the store so you pay
exorbitant prices for others. In the end, they profit. If all prices were
accessible online, it would be possible to write an application to minimize
consumer spending, but this would cause the whole system to collapse. If all
consumers could get all the deals everywhere--throughout their whole shopping
list--the grocery stores wouldn't profit.

~~~
extension
But is this really how people use grocery stores these days? I just can't
picture people running around to different stores, trying to get the best deal
on broccoli.

If there is one big grocery store significantly closer to my home than any
other, that's the one I will go to when I'm out of food, no matter what. If
it's late, I'll go to the one that's open late. If I have options, I'll go to
the "cheap" grocery store, which tends to have better selection and slightly
lower prices, on average.

Never, _ever_ have I done prior research on where to go or what I was buying,
except to check their hours. Most of the time I don't even know what I'm going
to buy.

So, they can't lure me in with sales. But what they _could_ do is keep track
of which flavor of yogurt is _ten times more popular_ than every other flavor
and stock the shelves proportionately, so that I have a fighting chance of
actually being able to buy most of the things I want on any given trip, and so
they don't have to throw tons of unpopular food in the trash.

They could also lay off the guys that awkwardly try to pack food in my
backpack for me since I can do a much better job of that myself. They might as
well lay off the cashiers too and replace each one with two or three of those
lovely self-checkout machines (I have tremendous sympathy for young people who
find themselves unemployable, but doing work that doesn't need doing is no
solution to that).

Because of the location thing, the grocery stores aren't really competing with
each other for my business. But they _are_ competing with restaurants and
starvation, both popular alternatives to the hassles of buying groceries.

If e.g. Google launched a grocery store chain, with all the expected
technological and common sense enhancements, they would steal most of my
business and create a lot of value that was never there before.

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mceachen
@tibbon: this is exactly the pain-point I wanted to solve when we applied to Y
Combinator (but we pivoted after being accepted into the summer batch and
built AdGrok). Antonio blogged about it: <http://adgrok.com/plan-a>

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ryanglasgow
Pretty sure Milo.com already does this.

~~~
tibbon
So it does! Of course the trick is expanding to more retailers and getting
this to be ubiquitous for all purchases- no doubt a goal of theirs. Right now
it seems to be big box stores only, but knowing about this now does make me
happy.

Sadly, my search for Founders at Work showed that the closest copy is at a
Target outside of Cincinnati, which is rather far from Columbus.

My search for an Aquafina water (1 liter), said that it might be at Target
(duh), but that I'd have to call them. I'm sure I can find the water closer.

However, it _did_ find me a white dress shirt for under $30 nearby (Macy's),
but still didn't know about the stock status and asked that I call.

A great start, and I'm glad you brought this up. I hope that in 5 years (or
far less) that it gets better and better.

~~~
Zarbazan
tibbon, check this out: <http://bit.ly/ciKymu>

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msort
Here is an idea: an eBay like site to link buyers and sellers in real-time.

One simple way to implement: Twitter hashtag #buyitnow

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cosmicray
Every single item of data can be considered 'original content' (unless you
plagiarized it from someone else). All those listings (or objects) represent
the informational abstract of the actual item you have to sell.

This 'original content' is the life blood of Google (and all the other search
engines). Google, and Bing to a smaller degree, are trying to organize these
bits of 'original content'. The problem that arises is when a big boy (like
Amazon, eBay, et al) wants to hijack your search (via paid advertising).

The key to making all this work, is to find a business model where every
seller (not counting the drop shippers) has an equal footing to sell the wares
they have for sale (physical or electronic).

Amazon is not an equal opportunity listing agent. They play one seller against
another in order to generate as much revenue as possible.

~~~
tibbon
Part of the equal footing in my mind is location. I want things locally, and
it isn't just big box stores near me. The closest stores in fact are tiny, and
that is likely the case for most people that don't live directly beside a
Target or Walmart. You are correct in that Amazon breaks things a bit.

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bemmu
Any ways to get this data indexed without contact with the shops? For example,
maybe you could write a kick-ass smartphone app that can track your grocery
spending by taking pictures of receipts and OCRing them. As a side-effect it
would produce a database of locations and items.

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yarone
Similar problem: Online ordering for takeout (like opentable for takeout).
Getting all the large restaurant chains is one project. Getting the hoards of
small, mom & pop, owner-operated restaurants is another project. It's a big
challenge. Selling them. Supporting them. In many cases, for example, there's
no fancy POS machine. Just a piece of paper. A "dumb" cash register.

~~~
dangrossman
There are a dozen websites providing this service already. Since they have to
sign up each individual restaurant, they cater to specific cities. My favorite
is campusfood.com, which provides online ordering for thousands of restaurants
in the cities surrounding over 300 college campuses. They had over 100
restaurants in the Philadelphia area when I lived there. The restaurants don't
need any special software or even a computer; orders are placed through the
website, optionally paid through the website, and the restaurant gets the
order by e-mail or fax.

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ESchmidtSeesYou
Fits.me is one company that's been working on the problem of buying clothes
online that fit well, using a robot mannequin:
<http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20018094-1.html>

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tmcneal
Not that this wouldn't be a cool idea, but why would a large company expose
their real-time inventory data via a public API? At the present I don't see
how any ROI could be achieved from the expense of making this inventory
information public.

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muriithi
I liked the article's heading and thought it had been done using image
replacement.

Turns out it is a font imported from Google's font directory called "IM Fell
DW Pica".

Nice font especially for headings.

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Zarbazan
Aggregating the inventory from brick-and-mortar - Goodzer's site and iPhone
app is coming in November. <http://bit.ly/ciKymu>

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yatendra
picksie.com is trying to do something similar for things to do around you. Its
coming out in closed beta and more data points soon.

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aidscholar
milo?

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Zarbazan
Milo got he interface right? Paaaalease....

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helwr
yeah, I'm working on it

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binspace
Finding directions (parking or public transportation from your current
location) to events is another good application.

Also, I wish sites had a link to google maps from their directions page.

