Entrepreneurial Brainstorming session N.5: NoHasslE-commerce.com, a C-to-C operations outsourcing solution
Before you mention it, I know the name is crap. But it is provisional.
The idea comes from the Ikea example: Ikea’s positionning is “good quality, low pricing”, which seems at first rather inconsistent. However, Ikea saves itself one of the worse bit of the purchasing cycle: the last mile. That’s to say the delivery and installation of the furniture. Many people have called Ikea’s strategy a “save the last mile approach”.
The same could be applied to e-Commerce. When I was trading on eBay, instead of being happy making a 3€ sale, I felt like a pain in the ass just thinking that I actually had to go to the Post Office and ship the product. It was such a waste, about 1 hour, of time just for 3€. That’s what made me stop being a seller and has so far prevented me from opening my personal shop on the Net.
Henceforth, I’ve spotted a huge opportunity for a very brick-and-mortar business, an intermediary in the e-Commerce value chain. This “save the last mile approach” intermediary is NoHasslE-Commerce.com.
Here’s how it works: you ship all your stuff to the nearest HoHasslE-commerce warehouse (note that Amazon could provide easily such a service; eBay couldn’t since they don’t operate warehouses), initial prices sticked on your items. Whilst your stuff is stored in our warehouses, you put these for sale in all the e-Commerce websites you like. If you effectively sell your items, NoHasslE-commerce ships it instantaneously to the buyer and gets half of the total amount of the sale, shipping fee charged back to you. You may change the price online anytime during the first year. After one year in inventory, if the item isn’t sold yet, it becomes a NoHasslE-commerce belonging and the initial owner doesn’t own any stake in case a sale happen. A tracking system will also remove automatically the sold item on one e-Commerce website from all the others this very item also appeared user.
There you go: NoHasslE-commerce.com is a very brick-and-mortar idea in a very virtualized world. But my bet such an initiative is likely to help e-Commerce democratize in the “busy people” and “lazy people” spheres. Hiring the right shipping/logistics/operations people, and of course a great website development team, may lower the risk a great right from the start. The only real concern I have about this business is its long-term profitability vs. cost of warehouse space lease.
What’s your stance on this e-Commerce entrepreneurial idea saving you “the last mile”, the most painful one, of your sales?
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Bibliography:
This very actually popped-up into my mind when reading the input of some bloggers on e-Commerce practices and new releases. I felt I ought to reveal my sources to you since you may also come up with good ideas reading these articles.
- in English: Minipreneurs, The Long Tail (by Chris Anderson)
- in French: Fred Cavazza’s Nous sommes tous des commerçants (thank you Hubert), Michel de Guilhermier’s The New Zlio is Live.
Addendum: Thanks to Cedric for letting me know about the existence of Mind Petals, an online community of entrepreneurs. Take a look at the site for the sake of it: well designed and some interesting stuff.
Related posts:
- Entrepreneurial brainstorming session #15: an online payment feature for bloggers (eCommerce)
- e-Commerce: eBay accounts for 20% of Deutsche Post's domestic traffic!!!
- Ikea 'saves the last mile', Amazon Business Solutions now saves YOU the FIRST mile
- Entrepreneurial brainstorming session N.10: software for the consulting industry
- Entrepreneurial brainstorming session #14: an online party planning software
Amazon, Business Process Management, Business strategy, CIO, Entrepreneurship, Globalization, Internet, Outsourcing, Storage, Supply Chain, eBay, innovation, operations, retail
Let’s work this out:
So your “pain” is the fact that you don’t want to go to the post-office with your 3-euro product?
Wouldn’t you still need to go to the post-office to ship it to the nohasslE-shop? Or, at least go to the shop to drop off your product?
I see the added-value to the idea that the shop takes care of the posting to all E-outlets, but how’s this?
You create a standardised template for what you want to sell and post it on every E-commerce site. 1-2-3 done. Then you ship it via UPS, Fedex, or whatever applies, having them pick it up, and including those costs in your overhead.
But here’s another business-idea. Create a website, where people can post their adversts and it gets posted to all relevant e-commerce site. No brick-n-mortar (thank god), or any other big costs. It’s such a simple idea that i would actually be surprised if it didn’t exist yet.
That won’t solve the post-office pain, of course, but I think you’ll find that many sellers don’t really consider that a big prolem, and have probably found alternative solutions for that as well.
As far as eBay or Amazon adapting their services goes, I think they are already organised so efficiently that they would never want to deal with the chaos of millions of goods going back and forth through their warehouses (if they have them). Last I read, Amazon’s warehousing-strategy is also to minimise brick-and-mortar as much as possible, anyways.
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- “Wouldn’t you still need to go to the post-office to ship it to the nohasslE-shop?” –> Sure, but at least you would ship all your items in one shot. And can repeat such a move every 6 months or year rather than needing to lose 2 hours at the Post Office twice a week.
- “Create a website, where people can post their adversts and it gets posted to all relevant e-commerce site. No brick-n-mortar (thank god), or any other big costs.” –> Well done Vince, this was the topic of the Entrepreneurial Brainstorming Session N.6! In order to do so, you need to have all major e-Commerce websites release an API. Furthermore, I can’t see why, say, eBay would accept to let access to its database since it has just signed an advertising agreement with Google. The idea is brillant but the execution not so easy, technically speaking.
Jeremy
Jeremy, you were a week early. http://www.amazonservices.com/fulfillment/
I can’t believe it…That’s exactly what I was talking about. Congrats Amazon, you got the full picture. Many thanks Kari, this deserves a post.
[...] Amazon recently launched a Beta version of looking very promising Business Solutions services. Amongst them the Amazon Fulfillment group…And guess what…All faithful blog readers remember my “Entrepreneurial Brainstorming session N.5“: I don’t feel like selling plenty of dusty books, just because I become lazy at the very idea of queuing twice a week at the post office. I needed Amazon or a new venture to same me the first mile just like Ikea saves itself the last mile, concretely the delivery and assembling, to offer cheaper rates. [...]