

Hunter Becomes the Prey - shopping is broken - dan_sim
http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/hunter_becomes_the_prey/

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SwellJoe
In the enterprise world, this is known as "lead generation", and these queries
for specific items would be "qualified leads" (meaning the buyer has
specifically expressed interest in the type of product you're selling). It is
a very profitable segment of the industry. That said, there are an awful lot
of problems bringing the model to consumer goods.

The instant gratification problem that naval pointed out in the
comments...Most folks have a buying process something like: Want, shop around
for a few minutes to a few hours, buy, have it within a week. Sometimes it
includes going to see it in person at a brick and mortar. Waiting for a bunch
of people (most of whom will be spammers) to submit proposals, is tedious and
boring...like being at work. A lot of enterprise product buyers even try to
avoid that process. I have a Dell small business sales rep, who usually gets
me better prices than the website, but I rarely go through him because the
process is tedious. It wastes more of my time than the money I save. I imagine
if I were buying dozens or hundreds of machines, it would begin to be worth
it.

The spam problem is always underestimated by people who don't deal with it
professionally. By the time Scott Adams sees the spam problem in his own life,
it has already made it through several anti-spam preventative systems. This is
a new way to spam, and will require new ways to fight it. I suspect one of the
lead generation models would have to be used...as dpatru suggested, vendors
paying a small amount to be displayed to the user would be a good path. A
vendor would probably happily pay a few pennies, or even dollars, to reach
someone that they honestly believe would be a good fit for their product. In
the enterprise world, you only need a few vendors, a few buyers, and very
expensive products, to make the model profitable. In the consumer space, you
need _all_ the vendors to make consumers really happy, and an awful lot of
consumers to make it worthwhile for vendors to monitor and respond to leads.

It's an interesting take on how vendors in this highly distributed world can
find out what people really want. Chinese manufacturers make almost everything
we buy these days...but what items people need and want, fashion, trends,
perception of quality and beauty, are different across cultures.

But, I don't think it will win out over automated recommendation and search
engines. Automated tools will get better (and have gotten dramatically better
in the past ten years) at helping folks find the right items. Amazon is
already pretty darned good at it...I _usually_ know which of a handful of
items in a genre I want within a few minutes of beginning my search. At worst
I read a few reviews, and then know. The Amazon model has the benefit of
having _other customers_ telling me about the products...I have a deep
mistrust of companies telling me about their products. Some are honest and
tell you exactly what you need to know, but most are hyperbolic to the point
of being nonsensical.

In other words, this is one of those ideas that sounds neat, and is a really
interesting thought exercise, but I really doubt I would _ever_ use such a
service, as a buyer or a seller.

------
Hoff
Adams is describing how marketing (tries to) work. Marketing seeks to identify
customers.

In a manner of consideration, Adams is seeking to acquire better and more
targeted search results, or skills in searching for products or services.
Google Adwords tries to offers something close. But the Googlers are not very
good at this level of targeting. (Yet?)

As for specifically contacting buyers, that's expensive for commodity gear.
And what happens when you find and proffer a product to a customer, and the
customer turns around and purchases that product from the lowest bidder; if
you can't automate this and keep the customer acquisition costs (very) low, a
business ends up a variant of the Brick-and-Mortar cost differential.

The middle ground - some form of a trusted concierge or consulting service or
search service - seems to be one of the few potentially approaches from both
directions; back to what amounts to a (trusted) middleman in the purchasing
process.

And a concierge service has inherent costs.

~~~
jsm386
Google AdWords, if managed properly, does a very good job at this. Take his
example: _For example, let's say you're looking for new patio furniture. The
words you might use to describe your needs would be useless for Google. You
might say, for example, "I want something that goes with a Mediterranean home.
It will be sitting on stained concrete that is sort of amber colored. It needs
to be easy to clean because the birds will be all over it. And I'm on a
budget._

So say I am retailer of stylish, affordable outdoor furniture, among many
other products (that is what is important in the query, more on the
Mediterranean part later). I might have an ad campaign dedicated to patio
furniture. Within that campaign I might have an ad group for plastic furniture
(easy to clean).

That ad group would include a mix of exact and broad match keywords/keyword
phrases like patio furniture, budget, cheap, affordable, stylish, along with
negative keywords like expensive, wood, etc. The ads would deliver him to a
landing page with links to hopefully appropriate furniture. On that page he
can then see the various items that meet his basic qualifications - stylish,
affordable, easy to clean - and click through to the items that look like they
would match his Mediterranean home, with its amber colored concrete patio.

Reading through what I just wrote: I don't know much about the furniture
business, but Mediterranean might actually be an important and useful kw to
advertise on...

------
andrewljohnson
The only problem with broadcasting my info to a vendor for some patio
furniture is that next week they are going to call me about some nice tiki
torches. Then, I'm going to get some snail mail from their buddy the BBQ
salesman, and his buddy the meat vendor will come a knockin' too.

Then, one of those guys is going to sell my information to totally unrelated
businesses, so I'll start get calls from people trying to sell me auto
warranties. I'll get endless catalogs from all their combined efforts, and
I'll never be able to read email again, because there will be too much spam in
it.

Finally, I will end up subscribed to some porno websites I never heard of, and
since I don't want to explain that to my girlfriend, I guess I'll just keep
using the canvas folding chairs that I have.

~~~
yeeyay
What if that related or unrelated business that wants to approach you based on
your ad for patio furniture, have to pay for that privilege. That might
definitely make those auto warranty guys have second thoughts.

~~~
andrewljohnson
they do have to pay for that privilege usually, and I still get terrible spam.

~~~
yeeyay
just thinking out loud, how about making the identity of the vendors that
respond to you and the conversation you have with them public?

~~~
andrewljohnson
maybe it just needs to be anonymous a la craigslist.

This is starting to sound like a great start-up to me.

ineed.com

------
mrshoe
I imagine the founders of Readbeacon (<http://www.redbeacon.com/>) will be
happy to read this post.

The first challenge I can think of for someone creating a service like this is
spam. If I put out a request for patio furniture, how does your service
prevent all sorts of other vendors from replying to my request and trying to
sell me something other than patio furniture?

~~~
dpatru
The easiest way would be to require a small payment to submit a "bid". Non-
serious sellers won't pay.

~~~
lsb
And, further, show more prominently the sellers that have the best conversion
rates, which you both could monitor via an intuitive analytics package.

~~~
yeeyay
Hmm. how about making the conversation between the vendor and the ad poster
public?

------
SandB0x
So users want a list of items, without massive duplication (many shops selling
the same toaster), while at the same time knowing the best price for each
item. Seems Amazon have this nailed with their multiple retailer options.

Maybe I'm being cynical, but for the site he describes you'd get a whole
ecosystem of "recommendation experts" or similar who will auto-spam replies on
ToasterCo's behalf, and you'd also end up with standard keywords emerging,
once people start to find words that correlate well with good replies.

It would probably work best in areas where companies sell their products
direct, and are small enough to give personalised replies. Large corporations
would surely give their sales people a set of model answers and you would end
up with replies indistinguishable from spam.

~~~
megamark16
So you institute a ranking algorithm that also watches for spam to insure that
all of a particular vendor's replies aren't either the same or just filling in
a template with keywords from a request and otherwise the same. That way, if a
vendor makes too many unpersonalized offers, they could get warned, lose
karma, whatever. Whereas if a vendor really targets someone's needs well, even
if they don't have the price or exact item that the buyer wants, that buyer
might still shoot them some good karma for trying.

 _shrug_

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techiferous
"www.answers.yahoo.com is a step in the right direction"

I never, ever expected to come across this phrase spoken seriously.

~~~
viraptor
Well - the idea seems sound. It's the same concept that makes stackoverflow,
serverfault and others work. If there's a problem, it would be the target
audience / moderation... Is there a stackoverflow clone for internet shopping
already online?

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frankus
Google cache link, as it's down for me right now:

[http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:http://dilbert.com/blog...](http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/hunter_becomes_the_prey/)

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nzmsv
The point about too many choices is just not true. I have a few online stores
I purchase from. And eBay. Sometimes Amazon, but me living in Canada means
that it's mostly restricted to books.

The average online store is so badly put together that it is the equivalent of
shopping in a dirty dark alley in terms of confidence :) So, I don't. I find I
keep going back to the same stores over and over. eBay wins because there is a
buyer protection scheme in place.

The the point about thousands of stores to purchase from only holds for items
costing less than I'd care about losing.

------
jordanf
The problem of too many product offerings (the paradox of choice / analysis
paralysis) is something I'm trying to address with my startup Kallow.

The issue with Adams' solution (which may work for some) is that customers
sometimes don't know exactly what they want, and have a hard time describing
it, especially when it comes to things like personal electronics. You are
essentially asking them to design a product for themselves, which sounds kind
of cool, but will leave a lot of people confused.

~~~
frossie
_customers sometimes don't know exactly what they want, and have a hard time
describing it,_

I don't want to minimise the problem quoted, but that is not the entirety of
it. There is still a problem for people who _do_ know what they want, due to
the one thing that is hard to quantify: whether the device performs its
function well.

The toaster example is particularly apt. I can start off knowing _precisely_
what I want: Say, I want a white 4-slice toaster with wide (bagel) slots and a
defrost function for under $150. Ta da! If that is all there was to it, I
could be finished in 3 minutes - it's not actually _that_ hard to find one
(though not with Google - you need a real e-commerce site like Amazon).

The problem is that when you _do_ find a few toasters that match your
requirements on Amazon, most have reviews like "stopped working after 2
months" "completely uneven toasting" "doesn't pop toast" etc etc. So then you
have to wade through review upon review on model upon model in order to find
the least sucky toaster. _That_ is when the toaster hunt becomes a time sink.

Now there are sites like consumer reports who are supposed to give you a
recommendation based on some actual testing, but of course they are too slow
moving - whatever model of toaster they recommended 18 months ago is no longer
to be found.

------
ianferrel
I respect Adams' opinion generally, but I don't understand why he thinks the
buyer would get the sorts of responses the buyer wants. Why wouldn't the buyer
just get spam (or, at best, directed advertising of the sort that Google
already has)?

If advertisers were able to respond well to the important keywords in his
description "easy to clean", "Mediterranean", "amber", "budget", they'd
already be doing so with Google ads.

------
smallblacksun
Do people really have trouble finding the things they want to buy online?
Whenever I do a search for information on any kind of product, I get a ton of
ads offering to sell it to me. This seems like a solution in search of a
problem.

~~~
gr366
I think the point was that there are too many options:

    
    
      Now you shop on the Internet, and you can buy from anywhere on the planet.
    
      The options for any particular purchase approach infinity, or so it seems.
    

So while you may get tons of ads offering to sell you something, how much
effort is spent determining which is the best match for what you want. It
would be better to get 5 results that are _really_ close to what you're
looking for than 500 that are sort of what you want.

------
heed
So he's proposing a recommendation system for any/all consumer products.

------
davidmathers
Shorter Scott Adams:

 _Business idea: beat Google at its own game._

It's just not going to happen. My approach would be to start with the
expensive ad-hoc shopping services that already work for rich people and
figure out how to standardize, commoditize and mass market them.

Any idea that has an element of "replace humans with ai" to it is ultimately
in direct competition with Google. Which means both that your service will not
be more useful than Google and that they will crush you whenever they want to.

The path to value, for everyone other than Google and Amazon, is to not
replace humans but instead make them more powerful.

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n-named
I don't think his proposed solution is logical, he incorrectly assumes people
know what they want.

------
nico
That blog post pretty much describes what Needish wants to be: www.needish.com

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megamark16
Darn, BroadcastShopping.com is already taken ;-)

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gojomo
I expect Hunch could easily grow this way: a mixture of introductory questions
to assess your purchase interests and priorities, leading to an increasing
proportion of sponsored 'questions' that are offers/pitches tuned to your
revealed preferences.

