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Shopping Malls: Content Aggregation
Models in the Era of Amazon Technology |
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22 December
2003 |
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It's the height of the holiday shopping
season, a time when smart shoppers click their way to
sanity via online outlets like
Amazon.com. But as much as Amazon is profiting from
holiday sales in their own storefront they're discovering
that the real money is in providing ecommerce capabilities
to others via its technology and online marketing experts.
The department store is learning how to be a shopping mall
operator, and in the process creating lessons for
aggregators of premium business content like Dialog,
Factiva, LexisNexis, OneSource, Ovid and ProQuest. Lesson
to learn: technology may change the content commerce game,
but it's still all about the customer. |
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I could mince words, but it's
simply put: I hate shopping malls. Nothing is more
dissatisfying to me this time of year than to trudge down to
the local shopping mall and to wrestle with stressed-out
shoppers and store clerks trying to make the best of an
experience that is part demolition derby, part Russian roulette
and part Chinese water torture. There's something for everyone
there, but when I'm looking for that particular something for
someone it's the choice of last resort. Thank goodness for
online sites like
Amazon.com,
where I can just click my way to the most obvious merchandise
that people want and then spend time cherry-picking those
special gifts that I know will be highly valued for their
thoughtfulness - if not their price tag. I found our
"Martha Stewart Doesn't Live Here: It's a Good Thing" ceramic
plaque at a local crafts fair, and it's given us years of
enjoyment for next to nothing.
Premium business content has long had its
own online shopping centers, with major brands such as Dialog,
Factiva, LexisNexis, OneSource, Ovid, ProQuest and others
providing aggregation of large and small content sources alike.
Increasingly liberated from their institutional libraries, many
professional users of these services can click their way to a
broad range of useful information from the comfort of their
desktops - most typically as a part of an institutional
subscription, but increasingly in packages oriented towards
individual uses, including Ovid's
recently announced pay-per view option for its journals
database. In all of this, though, these aggregators are playing
more the part of a department store than a shopping mall,
providing consistent access to goods under a common label with
very limited differentiation and brand awareness between
content sources. But as
Business Week noted recently, Amazon's model of enabling
ecommerce on independent sites such as Toys 'R Us as well as
its own online department store expands the metaphor of online
ecommerce into a model that is much closer to a true shopping
mall - common infrastructure with distinct branding and access
- which just happens to be owned by one of the anchor
department stores. It's not likely that Factiva will be hawking
its taxonomies to facilitate Sony PlayStation sales anytime
soon, but there are a few clear lessons to keep in mind when
considering what the professional content "shopping mall" of
the future should look like:
- Facilitating supplier relationships
with content end users. Having a huge collection of
professional content is still a key factor in aggregator
sales, but increasingly the use of electronic professional
content is as much about a relationship with the source of
the content as it is with its delivery. Users want consistent
access methods, but the need to understand a provider's
content in a context that makes sense from the focus of a
specific topic oftentimes makes the editorial sensibilities
and contact points of a supplier very important to
understanding its importance and use. Being able to
facilitate supplier brands and relationships effectively via
a common platform will enable aggregators to leverage the
value of their infrastructure in a way that will enchant
content suppliers getting the taste for more direct
provisioning via Web services and more open search
capabilities that reduce the value of "going to the mall" for
premium content.
- Enabling contextual ecommerce.
Big institutional subscriptions aren't going away any
time soon, but increasingly information professionals and
their users are "cherry picking" specific articles and
publications that can help to solve specific "just in time"
content requirements. Ovid's announcement is an good example
of this, notably accomplished with the help of content
ecommerce specialist
eMeta to
facilitate the transaction details, and Microsoft's
Office-embedded Reference Library provides a relatively crude
but effective corollary when ecommerce capabilities are
offered by a supplier. Content is where you find it, and
major aggregators need to be a better job of providing both
Amazon-like "finding" concierge capabilities to make users
aware of value-add purchase options and convenience "kiosks"
via Web services and other outlets to make specific kinds of
content available in a work environment where it's needed
most - at a premium.
- Selling content enabling expertise
to suppliers, not just a funnel. Providing the
technological framework to build out a "storefront" in a
content mall is one thing: providing the expertise to take
advantage of that location to maximize sales is quite
another. Companies like
ECNext
have abandoned the department-store approach to content
facilitation and act as mall owners and advisors to their
content suppliers, providing both common content ecommerce
infrastructure and a range of services to help publishers
seeking to become more adept at direct content sales via
their uniquely designed and branded sites. Notably ECNext's
services appeal most to small to medium sized research and
advisory companies - whose services rely heavily on knowing
what individual clients want and need, but who do not have a
lot of time and talent to devote to becoming content
ecommerce experts. In an era when knowing individual content
clients is becoming increasingly important, content
aggregators will find themselves increasingly looking at the
same dilemmas that Amazon has faced - and realize that the
"big pipe" will be less important in the long run than the
expertise and history of managing content relationships with
their suppliers' markets.
So the irony of technology being the
driver in expanding Amazon revenues by helping clients to build
their own ecommerce storefronts is that it ultimately is not
about the technology but the effective client relationship
management that the technology enables. Anybody can build a
shopping mall; not everyone knows how to make one profitable.
The trick for premium business content aggregators is to become
more comfortable with enabling their suppliers to manage their
own content commerce destinies while still keeping their
content department stores profitable in the face of open search
engine competition. In the long run this may prove as tricky as
finding a parking spot within spitting distance of a mall
entrance this time of year. Happy shopping!
-
John Blossom
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