eCommerce Shaping Retail

The reality of eCommerce is that the practices and capabilities have been reshaping the retail marketplace now for a number of years, really since exploding in the market.  Since that time the market has been expanding and extending these capabilities across all aspects of retail to deliver on omni market capabilities that have been really driven by consumers re-inventing their shopping and purchasing practices.  The changes brought about by these practices has not only changed the retail market capabilities, they have also shifted the control of shopping and purchasing from the retailer to the consumer. This shift is control is probably the greatest change brought by eCommerce and is definitely the most lasting change process shaping retail going forward.  This change process will continue to be driven by the consumer and the retail marketplace must utilize the collaborative network to help realize the changes demanded by consumers.

You can see that eCommerce continues to change the retail market in ways that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago, such as auto shopping and purchasing.  This has probably been one o the most dramatic changes; purchasing an auto online and the biggest change - delivery of your auto purchase to your home. This would have been inconceivable just five years ago but now it is accepted as not unusual.  This example follows the life cycle of eCommerce shopping; things that were inconceivable become reality through the demands and support of consumers.

The change in retail requires a focus on connecting with the consumer to collaborate on shopping and purchasing improvements to meet the changing consumer demands.  The changes themselves are really secondary because they are refinements to the process really the key change really is the consumer collaborative network that can be utilized to support identification and implementation of consumer demands.  Retailers have focused on the infrastructure and the omni market framework that will allow them to efficiently support changing demands. These changing demands are not really implementing changes to the framework or the fundamental functionality, these changes are instead putting the pieces together in different ways to adjust to the changing consumer lifestyle.

The collaborative network itself is really an outcome from the eCommerce consumer demands on the retail market.  This collaborative network allows the partners across the network supporting shopping, purchasing and consumer deliveries to work together in a highly collaborative method to deliver on the demands.  The network is critical to the on going change support of the consumer demands. The strength of the network though is the ability to add partners providing services and products quickly and efficiently based on consumer demands and new partner capabilities to meet current and new demands.  

I am very excited by the prospects and potential of the collaborative network to not only support existing demands efficiently but to also provide the framework to support growth and change going into the future.  The impact of eCommerce on the retail market can best be supported through a foundation of functionality that can efficiently be delivered through a flexible framework that is wrapped then by the collaborative network that provides the communication framework to understand and react to the discontinuous change which is the new retail marketplace driven by eCommerce.