An increasing number of American online-retailers puts its application programming interfaces (API) open for external developers.

According to Sucharita Mulpuru, who takes care of the developments in the American e commerce line, on behalf of Forrester research, sharing APIs could very well be ‘the next big thing’. ‘It absolutely makes sense to discover this. As long as you are careful in the way developers obtain access to your data, there is no backside.’

Products move
Also Gene Alvarez of consultancy Gartner expects that API (Wikipedia: ‘A collection definitions on basis of which a computer programme can communicate with a another programme or part’) will more and more often be opened. ‘In three yearstime,  25 up to 30 percent of large online-retailers will be using it. External developers can help their products, as it were, move over the Internet.

Netflix, Etsy and Amazon
Well known companies which already use  APIs to boost their online-sales are dvd-leasing companies Netflix and Etsy.com, a marketplace for hand-made goods. Also Amazon.com makes product data available by means of its Associates web service, with which the company lets others advertises for its products.

Best Buy
With its Remix-programma, Best  Buy is of the first, in relation to sharing product data. Recently the electronics chain launched a test version of its site consumersprice.com,  where shoppers can ask price alert. By means of API’ s , the site is linked to, among others, Google Maps, Twitter and Flickr.

One out of three Europeans bought something via the internet last year. This amounts to 150 million consumers according to a report of the European Commission. In 2006, 27% off all Europeans made a purchase online. Especially in Denmark (59%), the U.K. (57 %) and the Netherlands (56%) online shopping is very popular. In Belgium only 21% buys goods or services online. Movies, travels, hotels, tickets and multimedia are the most popular items. BeCommerce, the Belgian e-commerce federation also had a study executed. This showed that 4 out of 10 Belgians bought online yearly. Although the numbers may differ, one can see here an increase on a yearly basis (+42%). Per inhabitant, the turnover in Belgium is still less than half the turnover in the Netherlands. “So there’s still an enormous potential for the Belgian e-commerce” says BeCommerce.

However, it sees 3 impediments: the severe Belgian regulations for conditional sale, the prohibition for a long-distance seller to ask for an advance before the end of the “period of reflexion” and the severe rules on discounts. That is why Belgian e-shops could lose the battle with their neighbour countries.

“On the internet, an international alternative is only a mouse click away”
According to the European Commission the competition between countries should not be exaggerated. Helena Kunera, Euro Commissioner for consumer affaires says that consumers mainly stick to the national market. Only 7% shops online at a foreign supplier.

Online shopping is more environmentally friendly than driving to the shops, according to a new report from the Logistics Research Centre at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh.  Their work is being undertaken as part of the UK-Government funded Green Logistics research programme:  www.greenlogistics.org.uk The team found that, on average, having goods delivered to your home by parcel carrier generates significantly less carbon dioxide than making a special trip to the shops to buy the same item.

The research compared the carbon footprints of online and conventional shopping for small goods such as books, CDs, cameras and household items.  The work focused on the final stage in the delivery process, the so-called ‘last mile’, when goods are either delivered to the home or customers travel to the shops to collect them in person.  It was found that a typical van-based home delivery produced 181g CO2, compared with 4,274g CO2 for an average trip to the shops by car.  An average bus trip by a shopper produced 1,265gCO2.  In other words, when a customer drives to the shops and buys fewer than 24 small, non-food items per trip or travels by bus and buys fewer than 7 items, home delivery is more environmentally-friendly.

Download the free report here

With more than one in two UK consumers shopping online today — that is about 28 million consumers — online shopping and travel booking are mainstream. UK online shoppers outspend their European and even their American counterparts. Despite the current recession, we expect online retail and travel sales in the UK to continue growing strongly over the next six years as consumers move their spending online. By 2014, 37 million UK online buyers will spend £56 billion online predicts Forrester.

Tesco, UK’s biggest food retailer, is present in 13 countries employing 400.000 people. Today 1 out of 8£ spent in the UK is spent at Tesco. Tesco.com was launched in 1996 & is now the world’s biggest online food retailer pushing the key core values “convenience & trust” offering “unbeatable value to our customers”. Online is simply another channel time saving compared to the store. People order every week 40 to 60 items and placing such order should take less than 15 minutes.

Nick Lansley, Manager IT R&D projects at Tesco.com illustrated me their success story in a very humble way. He was part of the “founding team” and is still very active today. I like having discussions with those e-commerce survivors. They are the one who really know the e-business.

Here are his 10 lessons I wanted to share with you:

1. Sell Compelling Product Range
2. Use exit
3. Dedicate yourself to superb customer service
4. Help customers to feel save
5. Use that data!
6. Keep in touch
7. Promote your online presence in your stores
8. Make your website easy to use
9. Choose for in-house software development
10. Under- promise & over- deliver!

This is the powerpoint presentation that I gave during the First Brussels Digital Marketing Fair as well as the First Global E-Commerce Summit in Amsterdam on october the 27th. It is a mashup of different sources with a focus on e-commerce implementation illustrated by the Bivolino case on Hyves.nl.

The Powerpoint presentation can be found on my Docstock account. Acces the presentation directly via this link.

Early September, the buildings of the High Tech Science Park in Diepenbeek were crowded by a special collection of people. So what was the Fuzz about? A new project under the name Open Garments is launched. Open Garments stands for Consumer Open Innovation and Open Manufacturing Interaction for Extended Individual Garments. This project is going to be realised by the collaboration of different SMEs and research centres. The key participants are DITF, Bivolino.com, KHLim, ColorTextil, TNO and Centexbel.

The leading idea is that the consumer will not only be enabled to participate in all phases of the value creation process, but the user will be empowered to be an active actor in all phases of the value creation of customised, individual and extended garments. She/he will be a designer, producer and sales person. Therefore the consumer will be enabled with appropriate technologies to design and modify the garment, to extend it with individual accessories, to order this extended individual garment, to share the design and to improve it within a user community, and to offer and sell the design and/or the garment.

The key factors that led to the Open Garments’ proposal, are the undoubtly increasing demand for individual and/or customised goods of fashion (garments, accessories, jewellery, bags, belts, and other) and the opportunities of the digital world, of which are relevant for the Open Garment project:

• The recent success of the open innovation / open source phenomenon, performed by virtual communities
• Sophisticated knowledge management and communication methods
• Arising technologies for 3D-garment design and virtual prototyping, for 2D-digital fabric printing and for Rapid Manufacturing (3D-printing)
• Technologies for the production of textiles and garments in small batches

Open Garments’ overall objective is the development of a radically new organisational paradigm for design, production and sales of individual garments. Applying this new model the European Textile and Clothing Industry will be able to create and provide extended garments with a very high degree of customisation in terms of fit, fashion and function at a comparable price in less than 72 hours. This project concept is based on Open Innovation and Open Manufacturing. Open Innovation is the collaboration between enterprises and customers/users for innovation processes, where all participants contribute and share knowledge. Open Manufacturing is hereby a new conception for the production of customised physical goods, in this case of individual extended garments.

It’s supported by the European Commission seventh framework program nanosciences, nanotechnologies, materials and new production technologies – NMP. It is a collaborative project targeted to SME -Activity NMP-2007-3.1-2. New added-value user-centered products and product services.

It is not a hot young designer or a new label but an online evolution driven by peer-to-peer recommandation and consumers who want what they see others are buying online – in short a new kind of conspicuous cyber consumption. “It ’s what I call web 3.0″, explains Dawn Bebe, managing director of the UK’s first social shopping sit for women, Osoyou.com. Bebe believes that “The next evolution for the web is social networks that have purpose – vertical social networks”…this is where social shopping comes in. The things that bonds the people is shopping and fashion.

I strongly believe that she is absolutely right. This kind of approach is going to offer also an alternative to fashion magazines.

Another example I would like to share with you is iliketotallyloveit.com. It offers users a chance to build up a reputation for hunting out and recommending niche products that are hard to discover. This is the ideal platform for high end and luxury items where people like to show their taste of connaisseurs.

For many who love to shop online like I do, the next best things to buying merchandise are browsing and chatting about merchandise-planning the next strike, so to speak. The continual evolution of social networking and consumer-generated content is enabling online shoppers to move beyond transactions to achieve shop-talk unlike anything they’ve ever experienced. It’s one big think to talk with a couple friends over dinner and get their opinions on the latest goods, but it’s something else entirely to get recommendations from and provide feedback to a couple hundred-thousand fellow consumers. A multitude of shoppers are able to interact & pick & choose & recommend products with other shoppers online. Social shopping sites enable just that ! They connect consumers and give rise to discussions and recommendations, unlike comparison shopping sites, which typically focus on weighting product prices and attributes. Further, they are independent of e-retailer sites and e-retailers product reviews. I think that e-retailers should take them seriously as they redefine e-commerce. Just here some US examples I find interesting : Kaboodle, ShopWiki, StyleFeeder, ThisNext, StyleHive and CrowdStrom.