Delivery race, retail and fashion in our weekly recap (CW18)

The delivery sector seems to heat up. Everyone against Amazon – which still rolls out same day and even one-hour delivery with no mercy. It’s interesting to see that now even small merchants can use same day services to their customers.

For me it seems that small merchants and and retail are not dead after all. They are able to transform because service platforms enable them to offer service levels that live up to the customer expectations that are set by Amazon.

New realities, Amazon and payment in our weekly recap (CW16)

Mixed up week… The new reality is virtual – or augmented. At least the actors on the ecommerce stage start to really think about how virtual / augmented reality will impact on their business. It will be a very interesting journey (and we will keep on writing about it).

Somehow this rings a bell… remember 2003? There was a company called Linden Lab that created Second Life a virtual 3D world (more trivia on wikipedia). I can still remember the first days of trying it out. It was amazing. Then the hype kicked in and brands wanted to be part of it and started building their virtual places / shops. And it went down the drain.

Let’s hope that the new virtual reality get’s a better start – and better concepts.

Chatbots, Retail Transformation and Fails in our weekly recap (CW15)

“Invasion of the bots!” would be a nice header for the last week. As you can clearly see in the wordcloud, Facebook’s F8 conference and the Facebook chatbots are here. And they are likely to stay. As I pointed out in last weeks recap, I’m curious how this will change the way we shop and interact in the future.

And since I’m curious this brings me to an interesting story. Jeff Bezos (CEO of Amazon) pointed out in his yearly letter to investors, that the company is willing to fail. And that the competition is not failing enough. Another quotation from a famous CEO: “We aim to make mistakes faster than anyone else” (Daniel Ek, founder & CEO Spotify). So it seems we are back in the area where failure is an option (cause I personally had the impression that failing wasn’t a valid option in the last years). So let’s fail all together a bit more…