Hunter Becomes the Prey - shopping is broken

The instant gratification problem that naval pointed out in the comments...Most folks have a buying process something like: Want, shop around for a few minutes to a few hours, buy, have it within a week. Sometimes it includes going to see it in person at a brick and mortar. Waiting for a bunch of people (most of whom will be spammers) to submit proposals, is tedious and boring...like being at work. A lot of enterprise product buyers even try to avoid that process. I have a Dell small business sales rep, who usually gets me better prices than the website, but I rarely go through him because the process is tedious. It wastes more of my time than the money I save. I imagine if I were buying dozens or hundreds of machines, it would begin to be worth it.

The spam problem is always underestimated by people who don't deal with it professionally. By the time Scott Adams sees the spam problem in his own life, it has already made it through several anti-spam preventative systems. This is a new way to spam, and will require new ways to fight it. I suspect one of the lead generation models would have to be used...as dpatru suggested, vendors paying a small amount to be displayed to the user would be a good path. A vendor would probably happily pay a few pennies, or even dollars, to reach someone that they honestly believe would be a good fit for their product. In the enterprise world, you only need a few vendors, a few buyers, and very expensive products, to make the model profitable. In the consumer space, you need all the vendors to make consumers really happy, and an awful lot of consumers to make it worthwhile for vendors to monitor and respond to leads.

It's an interesting take on how vendors in this highly distributed world can find out what people really want. Chinese manufacturers make almost everything we buy these days...but what items people need and want, fashion, trends, perception of quality and beauty, are different across cultures.

But, I don't think it will win out over automated recommendation and search engines. Automated tools will get better (and have gotten dramatically better in the past ten years) at helping folks find the right items. Amazon is already pretty darned good at it...I usually know which of a handful of items in a genre I want within a few minutes of beginning my search. At worst I read a few reviews, and then know. The Amazon model has the benefit of having other customers telling me about the products...I have a deep mistrust of companies telling me about their products. Some are honest and tell you exactly what you need to know, but most are hyperbolic to the point of being nonsensical.

In other words, this is one of those ideas that sounds neat, and is a really interesting thought exercise, but I really doubt I would ever use such a service, as a buyer or a seller.

In a manner of consideration, Adams is seeking to acquire better and more targeted search results, or skills in searching for products or services. Google Adwords tries to offers something close. But the Googlers are not very good at this level of targeting. (Yet?)

As for specifically contacting buyers, that's expensive for commodity gear. And what happens when you find and proffer a product to a customer, and the customer turns around and purchases that product from the lowest bidder; if you can't automate this and keep the customer acquisition costs (very) low, a business ends up a variant of the Brick-and-Mortar cost differential.

The middle ground - some form of a trusted concierge or consulting service or search service - seems to be one of the few potentially approaches from both directions; back to what amounts to a (trusted) middleman in the purchasing process.

And a concierge service has inherent costs.

Then, one of those guys is going to sell my information to totally unrelated businesses, so I'll start get calls from people trying to sell me auto warranties. I'll get endless catalogs from all their combined efforts, and I'll never be able to read email again, because there will be too much spam in it.

Finally, I will end up subscribed to some porno websites I never heard of, and since I don't want to explain that to my girlfriend, I guess I'll just keep using the canvas folding chairs that I have.

The first challenge I can think of for someone creating a service like this is spam. If I put out a request for patio furniture, how does your service prevent all sorts of other vendors from replying to my request and trying to sell me something other than patio furniture?

Maybe I'm being cynical, but for the site he describes you'd get a whole ecosystem of "recommendation experts" or similar who will auto-spam replies on ToasterCo's behalf, and you'd also end up with standard keywords emerging, once people start to find words that correlate well with good replies.

It would probably work best in areas where companies sell their products direct, and are small enough to give personalised replies. Large corporations would surely give their sales people a set of model answers and you would end up with replies indistinguishable from spam.

I never, ever expected to come across this phrase spoken seriously.

http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:http://dilbert.com/blog...

The average online store is so badly put together that it is the equivalent of shopping in a dirty dark alley in terms of confidence :) So, I don't. I find I keep going back to the same stores over and over. eBay wins because there is a buyer protection scheme in place.

The the point about thousands of stores to purchase from only holds for items costing less than I'd care about losing.

The issue with Adams' solution (which may work for some) is that customers sometimes don't know exactly what they want, and have a hard time describing it, especially when it comes to things like personal electronics. You are essentially asking them to design a product for themselves, which sounds kind of cool, but will leave a lot of people confused.

If advertisers were able to respond well to the important keywords in his description "easy to clean", "Mediterranean", "amber", "budget", they'd already be doing so with Google ads.

Business idea: beat Google at its own game.

It's just not going to happen. My approach would be to start with the expensive ad-hoc shopping services that already work for rich people and figure out how to standardize, commoditize and mass market them.

Any idea that has an element of "replace humans with ai" to it is ultimately in direct competition with Google. Which means both that your service will not be more useful than Google and that they will crush you whenever they want to.

The path to value, for everyone other than Google and Amazon, is to not replace humans but instead make them more powerful.