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I recently read the book Groundswell and it had me putting in a lot of thought about the social aspects of e-commerce. I'd definitely recommend it.

I've done some e-commerce consulting projects and in the end it always turns to a discussion about "best practices". There's always the meeting with a client about something where the bottom line ends up being "Well... how does Amazon do it? They've invested a lot so they're probably doing it the right way".

Then they get their SEO people involved, and they put in their "best practices" 2 cents. And then it's the expert on conversion rates, and on and on until the site is just like everything else. But it's following best practices!

There has to be a better way, but with money at stake I think people are less likely to try something radically different than what's already working.

I think it doesn't give enough credit to Amazon et al who have done a fanatical job in making their businesses awesome.

So the question is who will the YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter of commerce be?

It might be facebook. fbConnect + fbCredits = social buying. Both of these exist but have yet to be combined.

Its these kinds of posts that encourage me to get my startup to market, quick.

Interesting read. Curious to see what will emerge

Commerce 2.0?