E-business models: 2007

jeudi 20 décembre 2007

I think that today more and more people are able to buy on Internet. The long tail is a powerful new force for our economy: the rise of a niche. Fist of all I would like to give a definition of long tail. According to Chris Anderson, the theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

One example of this is the theory's prediction that demands for products not available in traditional bricks and mortar stores is potentially as big as for those that are. But the same is true for video not available on broadcast TV on any given day, and songs not played on radio.

Everybody knows the economic effects of web retailing: economy on stocks, personnel, great option to monitor all sorts of marketing information, quickly adapt offers to demands; that make it a little bit similar to industrial “just-in-time” techniques - to minimize the expenses of all points of a distribution chain. Customers have immediate access to the whole shop database; they can find much more items with several clicks than while spending hours between bookstore shells.
The immediate great advantage of web retailing is interactiveness. The process of buying and selling becomes an exchange platform as for customers, as well for suppliers and aggregators: exchange of the opinions, products or affiliates services.

To conclude we could say that long tail is really adapted to e-business. Even if it is a new concept I am pretty sure that it will go further because there is still a huge potential in the cultural industry and as an e-business model, long tail seems to be adequate to change the mass consumption strategy.

Useful links to go further in with the long tail comprehension:

http://www.journaldunet.com/0703/070326-net-long-tail-definition-solution-outils-longue-traine.shtml

http://longtail.typepad.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail

mercredi 19 décembre 2007

More research about zlio.com

If you remember last time during the course, we had a look on many web sites with different types of e-business models. And to be honest my favorite one was www.zlio.com.

So yesterday just to have a better idea of how to use it and how does it work I created my own shop. You should try it that is great and you feel really free to do what you want. But I am going to share with you what I found interesting with this concept.

To watch my shop: http://illusionmagique.shopinblog.com/

The creation:

When you go on the first page of Zlio.com they tell you that you can set up your personal online store in just five minutes. I was septic but that was true it didn’t take more that few minutes to create the page you have above. And what I found amazing is the fact that they had anticipated all the problems of construction that you could meet and in fact you do not need any computing knowledge to make your shop.

About the products you want to sell:

As we said last time in class, you have to choose thought many products that they propose in their catalogue and I went further and I found that they are allowed you to select your products from a variety of over three million items.

The screen shoot above is interesting because it shows you how zlio try to advise you when you want to add or research some new products for your store. When you add a new product you have to make a small comment on it and put some tags to help the future buyer to find it easily.

Each time you go on this screen, zlio find out for you some products with similar tags so you don’t need to make hard research in fact you just have to click and add them to your shop.

How to make money:

Even if at the beginning we can not earn lot of money, we have to keep in mind that it is totally free of charge. I found four ways to make money with zlio.com:

The first one is when you get some commissions on the products you success to sell. Then the second one is if you have many cyber people visiting your shop but the prices of your products are inexpensive so you can go in the settings of your shop and choose an option that will give you more revenue, in fact you can add links from your store to others and you will be paid for these links on a per-click basis. I find that concept very great because if a visitor clicks through to an offer, you will get the commission even if they don't buy the product (example: 0.08€ per click).

The third way to get money is to help zlio.com to find new people to create new cyber shops. They give you the opportunity to send a message to your contacts through zlio.com to explain them the concept of the site. I tried this option and I don’t like it very much because the message you can send looks like a spam. But on the other hand it is totally benefic for you because you push your contacts to make their own boutique and zio.com will pay you for that, they will give you 10% of their commissions forever and 5% of their friend’s commissions.

The last way to get money I found is to put some advertisements from Google on the boutique. You can see some of them right on the picture below. I used Google Adsense to make it. The first time you want to use it you have to register but once again it 100% free of charge. I really like it because it’s easy and you are able to control what kind of things they are going to put on your page. Indeed Adsense program will scan the content of your shop and suggest you some ads relevant to your audience and your site content.