more E commerce
I was talking to my friend Jose, a recent arrival to Madrid from San Francisco, about what a small role e-commerce plays in peoples everyday lives in Europe. We were thinking that it might have something to do with weak fraud protection on euro credit cards, but I have the feeling that theres something else at play. I think its simply because (apart from Amazon.fr etc) euro E-commerce sites still have extremeley non "E" back ends which makes them only marginally more convenient, if at allor than bricks and mortar. A great example of this was when I tried to pay my tax d'habitation online, and ended up getting emailed a PDF to print out and mail in with a check. This week I experienced another example. Our employer has a contract with a french photo finishing bureau which entitles us to certain discounts on prints, film, processing etc. It has a seamless and well designed ofoto/shutterfly esque web site. The only difference is that it inexplicably deletes photos (even ones you have ordered prints of) within a certain amount of time. But this is a minor point. The big shocker comes when you realize what is happening on the back end. They have a standard 2 hour photo system: the ubiquitous Fuji Frontier. I imagine there are turnkey options to hook your webserver up seamlessly to the frontier itself. Now my expectation was that they would crank through the prints and well, mail them to me. Thats why I was suprised that there were no fields for a shipping address. It turns out that they print out a giant batch, and every Monday a rep from the company drives from Tours to Grenoble and sits behind a desk for one hour handing out the photos and accepting payment. I ordered 40 prints more than two weeks ago and still havent received them. The first time the woman unapologetically informed me that they simply weren't there, and re-focused her attention on reading a book. Yesterday there was a handwritten sign informing me that there would be no photo pick up today. No rescheduling or explanations were provided. Compare that with the service bureau I am working with for my fine art prints on a ZBE Chromira. I didnt hear from them for a bit, so I emailed them today and they told me that not only were my proofs finished, but they had been mailed last wednesday. Its not a 100% fair comparison, because west coast digital is one of the best imaging places in California (which is saying a lot!), and the work photo place is like a mini shutterfly... but I feel like that should be an even better reason for the smaller machine print company to be hands off: order prints->frontier prints them->mail them to customer. It should be fast, automatic and way faster than makinf fully color managed, individually processed prints. I would say that in the US you would need to be kicking WCIs ass in terms of speed and volume in order to stay in business. Its perplexing.
2 comments:
I'm sure you're right that there's few well-developed backend architectures for e-commerce in Europe but that's the symptom not the cause.
I still think if banks in Europe said: "Go ahead, shop online, you're protected" people would do it in a heartbeat. In fact, it may already be that way in some parts of Europe, I don't know.
And when they do, all the other stuff will fall into place.
Now, maybe one reason why banks haven't done that is cultural. I have some theories about how people do "business" here in Spain that I need to really test but, yes, I suspect one reason why banks haven't been asked to do this -- to set off that chain reaction of online commerce -- is that consumers and vendors (of goods, services, media) have a very complex relationship right now that has deep cultural roots.
To change that would require more than technology -- a new culture. Of course, the two feed into one another.
I guess we'll find out soon enough.
supply chains that don't work, poor UI's etc are all symptoms. But as you point out, so is the lack of ease and security at the time of purchase!
I'm certain that there are underlying non-technical reasons (i.e. cultural and/or political) why E-commerce is broken, too. It might, as you say, be related to French expectations of what their shopping experience should be... If so, then why did it happen so easily in the states? Maybe J-crew and strip malls paved the way (!)?
in any case, its much more entertaining to mock the "symptoms".
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