Ecommerce is a wide ranging topic, for our purposes we’ll be discussing ecommerce in the context of transacting payments for services and products for both busines to consumer and business to business applications. This would also include possibly government and military applications which do participate in ecommerce in the way we’re discussing.
Ecommerce is taking off. Sales credited to ecommerce have exploded and will continue to grow at an extremely fast pace. Retail businesses, those selling to consumers, are forming new business strategies based on strong ecommerce commitments. Many retailers have cut their inventories drastically in their brick and morter locations, while expanding greatly what they offer for sale on their ecommerce website. This is a natural progression, although expedited in light of the currect economic recession. We expect retailers to move toward a “superstore” model, where there may only be one show floor stocked with products which serves a single state or region. Specialty retail stores have already made this move, in fact some came from catalog sales and launched massive retail locations that serve multiple states. Cabelas, the hunting, camping and outdoors company, started as a family run catalog business, then expanded into several large super-stores that serve a wide region consisting of many states. We suspect this may become the model business, supported by great customer service which would have to include lenient return policies. This model would incorporate a large variety of products for sale on the company’s ecommerce websites.