eCommerce 2021 — The age of acceleration and the prediction of nothing.
Tags: Retail Technology, Retail, Economics, Covid19 Crisis, Ecommerce

When things go wrong, we typically react, we do not respond. I learned this expression during a discussion with my wife who had attended a mindfulness workshop 5 years ago now. The words in this are important — respond, do not react. We have had 9 months of reaction. Now, we must respond. On all fronts.

Early declarations of the improvement in humanity and the growth of ecommerce, were premature. We all looked to the light and just limped along really until we eeked closer. Ending the year, that light seems more blurred and out of reach than it has than ever before. Failing health systems and a lack of impetus to change them leaves us still meandering down the same path we were on before this all began. The same can be said for ecommerce.

However, if we want some of this to stick, we need to think beyond now. This is difficult because survival is our core instinct right now and has been. That protection is hard to shake and this makes andy new entrant emotion seem irrelevant. #ecommerce has enabled economies to survive but has placed burdens and exerted enormous pressures along the supply chain as a result. If we wanted a signpost on how to classify this, we need to look no further than Kevin Kelly’s book, The Inevitable. There is a clue in the Title.

12 Technological Forces That Will Shape The Future

How Businesses Can Adapt To Digital Transformation

There are countless examples of what has been emerging and evolving all around us, we chose to do very little with it. Up until now that is, necessity it seems is moving closely from being the mother of survival to becoming the mother of invention. Much like the absolute importance of a positive climate action initiative, we need a proper and complete agenda for an age of digital — we won’t get it, I might add, but we should look to develop one. Democracy and shrinking govt GDP numbers will see to that.

The 12 forces reviewed in the context of reviewing COVID19

Making predictions for change is a futile exercise given the current volatiltiy and uncertainty, but what if we looked at the last 9 months in context and decided what we need to do collectively to take the best of what we learned and make it stick. But that is also contingent on us deciding and agreeing that our economy needs a new basis for growing, it survived, barely before this.

Specifically, Retail as an industry is in dire need of careful consideration. Waiting for it to restart is foolhardy and naive at best. It needs a drastic rethinking and redesign. We survived with a lot less, of everything. Maslow’s well-documented hierarchy now is something of great relevance, as is Porters 5 forces. Those external forces we previously ignore, are currently the only force. Governments need to reassess how they want to step forward rather than return to status quo. #eCommerce has become the default talking point, but we are at the cusp of a new age of revolution. We need to realise that the tools of ecommerce, are now the tools of doing business. This is our starting point.

According to Kelly, the 12 technological forces are:

1. Becoming

It finishes nothing as we live in a world of continuous change. Software, hardware, products, services, and even people’s experience endless upgrades, so we are always in a state of becoming where nothing is ever finished. Kelly says we need to embrace this change and be prepared to react to the unexpected. He is an optimist who believes that “things are better today than they were yesterday, although only a little better.”

So, how does this impact strategy and release cycles. This is core to why the Shopify Plus model is a good indicator of how development cycles and indeed product defvelopment should be treated. A simple look at this recent twitter thread from Jean-Michel Lemieux details this in black and white — we laid the foundation for something better. On our side, we need to sit and wait. But knowing something is not “good enough” or “perfect” is actually good enough. We need to work on that principle and adjust our workflows. For ecommerce practitioners, break your year into quarters and open up channels ASAP. All the while, become the master of one.

2. Cognifying

This made-up word signifies the rise of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and most objects around us. Artificial intelligence is emerging, not from giant standalone computers, “but in the superorganism of 1 billion computer chips known as the net.” Three important breakthroughs have made this possible: cheap parallel computation, “Big Data,” and better algorithms. The rise of intelligent robots–both software bots and physically embodied intelligent machines–is happening exponentially, much faster than most of us realize. With the Internet of Things (IoT), intelligence and conductivity are being baked into every object we encounter in our life.

This is important as we look to manage the health of a population and do so in a secure and meaningful way. Engaging in elections will become even more challenged it seems too, deciding who we vote for could be a direct by product of the tech they use. For all those new to traditional ecommerce, we have skipped a decade of agency work and we are now giving you AI led advertising, wheere you just need to assign your budget and costs. The rest is with the platform, your job is to be where your customers are. But wait, it always has been.

3. Flowing

Kelly says the Internet is the world’s largest copy machine because making exact digital copies is easy and involves zero marginal costs. Digital copies of everything we create can then be sent out everyone on the Internet at the same time. Because so much is coming at us we now experience the Internet as a stream into which we dip our toes, so to speak, to experience a small fraction of what is available. Millions of us are constantly monitoring flows of Facebook and Twitter streams. The time now flows rather than being in batch mode or reoccurring schedules. Everything is available all the time, on demand or live. Kelly says, “The union of a zillion streams of information intermingling, flowing into each other, is what we call the cloud.

Everything that can be made digital, is being made digital. Working in the legal system or in accounting, well get ready to be automated. Setting up an ecommerce store has never been easier or inter-platform migration has not been too. IN 2/3 years you will change platform like you do banks, without the stress of SEO loss or time loss. Shopify has seen to this, rightly or wrongly.

4. Screening

We are in a global transition from being “people of the book” to becoming “people of the screen.” Today, over 5 billion digital screens illuminate our lives, and display manufacturers will produce 3.8 billion additional screens per year. “On a screen, words move, meld into pictures, change color, and perhaps even change meaning… This liquidity is unnerving to any civilization based on text logic,” Kelly argues.

I am sure there is plenty to argue here as book sales sky rocketed during the last 9 months, but this was our thirst for knowledge and spending time. Our consumptions methods are increasingly blurring on all fronts. Watch for the emergence of in TV/in streaming/in audiobook purchasing next year. Screening makes this possible.

5. Accessing

Kelly believes that in an urban world, it is more important to have access to items than to own them. We expect things we want to be available in real time, from wherever we are located. This is giving rise to the importance of platforms that manage transactions to bring objects to people whenever they want them. “For a long time, there are two basic ways to organize human work: affirm and the marketplace.” Now there is a third option — platforms, and the availability of almost infinite storage through cloud computing. The dream of quick access to anything we want at the moment is coming true, at least for those living in the developed world.

From an #ecommerce perspective, this presents many opportunities that have already a blueprint for success

Scrap loyalty points and rewards — enable services that encourage retention

Make marketing time based — This is where good online grocery experiences can win — udnerstanding the consumption timeframe makes marketing flows easy. This type of marketing is sustainable, promotes sustainable and makes one of the toughest “values” work -sustainable.

Accessing goes deeper, places like the @Ballymaloe food cookery school went from having 60 people on site for 12 weeks with profitability capped do delivering online cookery courses for over 600 people at a time, with unlimited and uncapped possibilities. Premier league football clubs are giving paid access to the dressing room embracing the need for new revenue streams in the absence of gate receitps. When will governments realise the same.

6. Sharing

We live in a world of incredible abundance, yet many of the objects we own, such as houses and cars, are only used for small parts of our daily lives. Ownership has given way to the sharing economy. Because of ubiquitous networking, cooperation, collaboration, and collectivism are the new watchwords. Open source and peer production are flourishing. Some management of sharing, such as organizational websites, is necessary, contends Kelly, but “we learned that while top down is needed, not much of it is needed.”

We have not yet adopted this culture shift, but that is what is required. As we move into our second year of this pandemic, we hear rumblings of more to come and increasing climate problems. What happens when two collide. Having experienced our most libertarian value, Freedom, being removed from our possession this year, it seems only a matter of time that we have restricted access to climate negative services. Our inability to manage climate change and willingness to adopt a new way of living, will be also revoked from our excess list, should it be needed. The sharing economy will open up finance markets, hospitality and the gig economy. Watch for an Tim Fung and Air Tasker style company delivering for us in 2022.

7. Filtering

We are living in an information explosion. ”Every 12 months we produce 8 million new songs, 2 million new books, 16,000 new films, 30 billion blog posts, 82 billion tweets, 400,000 new products.” Filtering is needed to select the few things we can pay attention to. Filters coupled with artificial intelligence allow for large-scale personalization. Both crowdsourcing and expert curators are used to select the best of what is available because it is impossible to assess everything produced yourself, even in one subject area.

Very simply put, for any brand looking to grow in the next 2 years, filtering will be your greatest challenge and represent your best opportunity to refine your brand through your customer's eyes. Miss this opportunity and we will see you on your next venture — it is that simple.

8. Remixing

Examples of remixing include fan fiction, music sampling, and website mashups. Universal tools for creation are reducing the effort needed to create movies, and everyone can have their own channel on YouTube. Software such as Photosynth grabs thousands of photographs of the same location on the Internet and stitches them together into a highly detailed 3-D model. New artificial intelligence algorithms are allowing us to find things within images and texts, even when they have been remixed

9. Interacting

Virtual reality results in immersive experiences where we react to stimuli in the virtual world. Augmented reality gives more data points to process. Devices will increasingly have more senses and will interact in increasingly sophisticated ways with humans. “The tiny camera eyes that now stare back at us for many screens can be trained with additional skills.” The artificial intelligence in our devices will detect our emotions and act accordingly. “The dumbest objects we can imagine today will be vastly improved by outfitting them with sensors and making them interactive.”

10. Tracking

Self-measurement has become a movement, resulting in “the quantified self.” Once you have collected enough data on yourself, personal analytics software with AI will provide us with feedback on the state of our health, our achievements, and our mental states. Lifelogging, tracking everything you do 24/7, will allow you to find your own personal baseline–your normal–which will be different for each person. This will lead to new scientific methods and change how experiments are done.

Laws on privacy are changing advertising as I write this. Imagine the flip version of how we should have treated our digital wallet or digital DNA. Google recognises Vinny from a number of data points and suggests he may be a good fit for Brand X because of their algorithmic reading of him and from their in-depth knowledge of the brand. Google pays Vinny a transaction fee for his personal data usage and the brand now has access to this potential new client. This type of proactivity may have missed the boat the first time around but anonymity, voting preferences, medical records and public health score may lead us to rethink and re-clarify the value we place on our own data.

11. Questioning

Because we can’t predict the future, then we need to question everything. We already have difficulty separating fact from fiction because there is so much information on every topic imaginable available on the Internet. The “gap between questions and answers is our ignorance, and it is growing exponentially,” says Kelly. We can expect future technologies such as artificial intelligence, genetic manipulation, and quantum computing to unleash a barrage of new big questions–questions we could have never thought to ask before. In fact, it’s a safe bet we have not asked our biggest questions yet. “Every year we ask the Internet and trillion questions, and every year the search engines give back a trillion answers.” Never stop questioning

A very simple approach to strategy, start with why.

12. Beginning

We are just at the beginning of these changes, which Kelly believes are “inevitable.” While the specific details may change, he believes that the big trends in information and communications technologies have marched forward and won’t stop unfolding over the next 30 years.

Considerations we should be exploring as a matter of urgency over the next 12 months:

How to tackle local distribution services and chilled delivery — huge potential to GDP numbers, employment

Where to focus education next — ecommerce as a skillset was forgottten and now should be set as the baseline — build on top of it.

There are many more things we learned and I will be sharing more micro-moments over the days ahead. These are not predictions, these are the things that happened this year. We survived, but going back to how things were, is sadly not something our business world needs. Fortune favours the brave and we need that focus as the world's borders all become a little harder to overcome this year. As a small island nation, we have to put our reputation to the test and think our way through this. Oh and less than 14 days to Brexit…..