Friday, August 27, 2010

Trust and the Micro marketplace

Too many people lookin back (Bob Seager) -




OR maybe not - a little web crawling revealed this bit of history...



"Etsy is a good example of an emergent business network that creates trust within a specific market. That trust enlarges the market by enabling transactions to happen. Then more suppliers come into the network to meet growing demand and the range and quality of products improve; and so the consumer demand improves and so on….



Just don’t try shoving mass-produced junk through these networks. It won’t work. These networks have a very good junk filter!"



Written by Bernard Lunn / February 27, 2008 1:42 AM pulled from http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/etsy_ebay_distributed_mass_customization.php



Wriiten while Etsy and sites like 1000Markets were the new "happenin" thing. I don't think the author had any idea how big it might get, or that it might have similar problems other sites have had once they are infiltrated by the mass marketers, and beholden to investors....




So in the harsh light of today, does this rose colored glass view of the future - posted long ago - hold true? How does it relate to the several marketplaces like 1000Markets/Bixbe, Neerg, the newly emergent Cargoh?



The article written in the year 2008 still reflected a strong economy, excitement over anything web like, Ebay was flying high and everyone was in love with the new economy. Reading the article is both inspiring and perplexing, what happened. As the statements concerning the purpose of this site imply, sites like this and our shops would be or are the drivers of the NEW - new economy. But this has been both incredibly succesful for some - but not clearly understood by others. It all seemed a grand dream - this market transformation prior to 9/11 and the housing/banking mess of a recession, but is it slow to happen, or are we slow to actually buy into it? Or did something that happened in between alter the path of everything? Reading that old blog (from when blogs were not flippin' everywhere) the sense of unlimited possibilities and exuberance seems almost otherworldly in retrospect.

I think it still has relevance in historical context specifically the bit about trust expanding the market...is it just the economy that raises some of the questions in my list of posts above? Or is eroding trust eroding all the markets (Macro and Micro) where is the lack of trust coming from? The world in general being less trusting and trustworthy (BP, Government in general, business models we were all tought in college) Did the new wear off this NEW -new economy too fast? Or is it all pent up in some holding pattern waiting for the breakthrough?



The web is prevalent in most all of the world markets and allows even micro business like our shop to have the global reach of the larger global corporations with the cost structure and lightning fast customer service and response time of smaller more adaptable business. So why are we not experiancing enormous growth percentages in our shops. Some are doing OK I imagine, but for others it is fleeting and a struggle with the zietgiest of Macro-econ pressure, and as Cargoh has illustrated, the lure and fikle nature of the poparazzi affected buyer.



Have we come as far as we thought with the web-enabled, wold market theory and it is just the Macro-mistrust that affects our sales numbers and revenue generation?



Or is it something else?



Are buyers just so saturated with professional photos of the items in web catalogs that our products pale in comparison?



Are there trust issues related to experiance from more mature sites like Ebay where those out to make a quick buck are selling items made in third-world sweat shops for pennies over cost and making it on volume with absolutely no customer service etc.?



Will the world choose to shop at a web enabled- global equivilent of Wal-Mart over the resurgent sole-proprieter workshop our shops replicate that existed since the dawn of towns and cities, historical American and European mainstreet, and now in the global market of the web?



Time may tell, I hope we have the time to make it work.

To purchase from The Wolf Creek Millworks:

http://www.1000markets.com/users/wolfcreekmill