Future Consumer.com - Softcover

Frank Feather

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1894622189 ISBN 13: 9781894622189

Publisher: Warwick Pub, 2002

Analyzes how online shopping will transform consumer behavior, forecasts online sales potential for twelve product categories, and speculates on which Web sites will dominate online shopping by 2010.

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From the Publisher:

EXTRACT from the PREFACE to the Updated 2nd Edition (Tradepaper Version)

Forget the “dot-com shakeout” and the Nasdaq meltdown of 2000. Every seven seconds somebody new buys something online for the first time. The Internet Revolution, or “Webolution,” rolls inexorably onward and e-commerce will soon rebound stronger than ever. Online shopping is gathering strength and the dot-com shakeout will ultimately be seen as a small hiccup.

By 2010, the Internet will gobble up 30 percent of retail spending, leaving most brick-and-mortar retailers in rubble. All but the most savvy will get killed. Most strip malls and many shopping malls, along with half the department stores, supermarkets, retail chains, banks, and local shops, will vanish without a trace as click-and-buy e-tailing takes over.

The head-spinning Webolution is not easy to forecast. However, before it’s done — around 2018 — it will reverse and unwind virtually everything that the Industrial Revolution put into place. It will smash the mass consumption economy to smithereens and re-center it on the home.

The Webolution is so big that few yet grasp its significance. Since the dot-com shakeout, there have been many silly Web obituaries. Doubtless, the plodding plowman didn’t “get it” when the first steam train puffed past his field. So it is with many journalists and economists today when they dismiss the Web.

But this Webolution will rock the world, again utterly transforming life and commerce. And the rewards will accrue fastest to those who embrace it first. Online sales will kick in big time in the years 2002–2005, and grow rapidly throughout the decade to top $1 trillion by 2010. By then, the Web will be a hundred times bigger than today — a tidal wave HyperWeb that will drown those who can’t or won’t surf.

The Internet is fast becoming a shopper’s paradise. It is changing not only how people buy, but how often, when, what, why, and from where. By 2010, a majority of Americans will live what Bill Gates calls a “Web Lifestyle” and will do at least some e-shopping. Most of them will do most of their shopping online.

Where will people buy? Whether or not pure e-tail Web sites such as Amazon.com will still be a favorite of online shoppers in 2010 is an intriguing question. In any event, such sites now serve as a living laboratory of the future of retailing. For sure, the “first-movers” have left their offline brick-and-mortar competitors in catch-up mode.

Some people argue that old-world retailers should leverage their offline assets and brand name to create a seamless online presence that out-competes the upstarts. But such a hybrid “brick-and-click” approach fails to recognize a simple reality of the online world: Most Internet users maintain a “favorites” list of bookmarked Web sites that they visit most frequently. More important, the average favorites list contains no more than two or three dozen Web sites.

So the debate about who will win — pure bricks, pure clicks, or bricks-and-clicks — misses the point. All retailers are competing for consumer attention. If consumers won’t have more than 15 retail sites bookmarked on their favorites lists, then there will be no more than one or two winners in each major product category. Hence, due to the rapid ramp-up of online shopping and the limited space available on the average e-shopper’s favorites list, each retail category faces a massive shakeout.

Clearly, the retail battle will be decided on the favorites lists. Web sites that don’t get bookmarked either will constantly struggle to survive or be swept swiftly to oblivion. Conversely, those sites that garner most surfers’ attention will win — big time!

And that’s the story of this book.

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