Consumers are motivated by price. If they weren't, Bargin Finder
wouldn't be so popular. People are also motivated by convenience.
I willingly pay money to have products shipped to me instead of
driving around town to find them. Mostly consumers are motivated
by success. What?
The biggest problem that consumers are having right now is finding
something to buy. If I want a specific product that is fairly
common, chances are 50:50 that I won't find what I am looking for.
On the autoshoppers alias a few weeks ago, someone outlined a
shopping experience that was dismal, just looking for a PC Tape
backup system.
Before you resolve the problem of becoming a commodity, you will
need to revise the entire capitalistic business paradigm of competing
with your vendor peers. You will need to "cooperate" with them
to establish a method for people to really find what they want
or people really are going to not use this new medium for real
shopping. You can refuse to work with your competition, and then
the new shopping methods really will be based upon price and only
the commidity capable vendors will survive. Japan was very successful
in creating several companies that were cooperative enough to force
American vendors out of the market, but were still capable of
differentiating themselves well enough to make a profit.
If you want my entire rant on this subject, go take a look at
the Sunday edition of the Internet-Sales alias about 2 weeks
ago. &lt;a href="<a href="<a href="http://www.mmgco.com/">http://www.mmgco.com/</a>">http://www.mmgco.com/</a>"&gt;http://www.mmgco.com/&lt;/a&gt;
We don't have to be commodity based. We must change our way of
doing business, now, if we want to prevent the evolution of
commodity only shopping.
In addition, I do believe that in the long run, almost every product
will become a commodity. It will be the services that come with a
product that are the value-add. In that case, the small grocery
that offers a home delivery service might have a good chance of
competing, if they can offer more personalized service than the
big guy.
Mary Morris
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