| Ecommerce's Monthly Talking Point: November 1999 On Impulse Power Two New York companies, Kozmo.com and urbanfetch, are locked in a legal battle over ownership of the concept of rapid delivery. Kozmo.com offers its one-hour delivery shopping service to customers in New York, Seattle, Boston and San Francisco. Urbanfetch has "The World's Most Hassle-Free Return PolicyTM", but its one-hour delivery is strictly to New York neighbourhoods at the time of writing. We've become used to ordering products easily, paying for them securely and arranging shipping. But that's been the limit of instant gratification on the web to date. 'Just in time' delivery systems bring efficiencies to the manufacturing supply chain, but they stop short of the customer. The offline world is populated by shoe shops that instantly run out of the most popular size in every range, and fashion stores stuck with pre-emptive summerwear in a freezing March. Retailers use their experience and judgement to predict consumer needs, with 'just in case' stock profiles an inevitable outcome. The web has proved to be a formidable tool for researching, comparing and configuring products. As an environment for impulse buying, it has some way to go. We aren't always such great managers of our lives, and we increasingly live in circumstances that create instantaneous demands and desires. 'Click here' is a call to impulsive behaviour; but the best consumer ecommerce sites facilitate decision-making while inevitably frustrating completion. The product doesn't materialise on your desktop. Speeding up the selection process highlights the delay in its completion. Bringing 'just in time' expectations to the consumer market will create new opportunities in the logistics business. Will taxi drivers, light van owners and cycle couriers stand to benefit from an explosion in metro package delivery? Or will neighbourhood stores and post offices experience a surge of new vitality as they become local pickup centres for web-ordered goods? It's likely that both effects will feature as consumers increasingly demand real-time fulfilment. Companies like Kozmo.com and urbanfetch signal another stage in consumer ecommerce's coming-of-age. They are helping to create a truly responsive environment. The term responsive environment is often used to refer to the pervasive growth of integrated computing and communications - a world saturated with "web tone" and fluid connections. But responsiveness isn't only about primary technology. It's about the management of the entire value chain. As ecommerce integrates into our lives, we'll find the real world emulating the virtual one, with physical fulfilment providing true responsiveness - the actual satisfaction of actual needs, in near-enough-real time. Those companies that establish brands known for speedy and reliable delivery will control a healthy proportion of online transactions, and the customer relationships that go along with them. |