Everything Old Is New Again

I just read a blurb about a company called Cartfly in the E-Commerce Times. After checking it out it seems that a concept that failed the first time around may have another chance at life.
It’s fascinating that the old adage that everything old is new again, even if in the internet age that progression happens more quickly, is as alive as ever!

It seems to me that what Cartfly is doing is in many ways very similar to the concept that was attempted by a company that I worked at as a sales engineer/evangelist during the dot-com boom/bust period. That company was called CrossCommerce [RIP] and their idea was to take e-commerce out of the walls of a typical “store” and instead embed buying opportunities within content-rich sites.

The concept was called “contextual commerce.” There were all kinds of studies that showed that the conversion rates were much higher for products that were displayed inline with interesting content. For example, if you ran a site about snowboarding and had a story about a recent trip, you could display small product display “shelves” in the story that would allow people to buy the products you were talking about right then and there.

It was a compelling idea, especially at the time, because for the most part there was nowhere near the opportunity to monetize a content rich site other than banner ads. It was before Google’s AdSense had established the strangle-hold on the ad world. This was back in the day of roll-your-own banner advertising, or relying on folks like DoubleClick.

One of the hugely significant things about CrossCommerce that was different was that a large portion of CrossCommerce’s operations was taken up with developing the business relationships with the OEM’s and distributors of literally millions of products. From the old stand-bys like CD and Videos to golf and sporting equipment.

It was literally a one stop shop for content producers. Once you had an account with CrossCommerce (which was free as CrossCommerce made money off a vig/transaction charge) you would go to your CrossCommerce site, choose the products you wanted to sell from the massive catalog, create the little shelf, copy the javascript code that was generated and put that code in your content where you wanted to the products to appear.

In my opinion, it was bloody brilliant (which is why I worked there and stayed around too long even after the writing was on the wall, the rats were leaving the ship, etc. etc.)! It was one of the few ideas to come out during the dot-bomb time that was actually a really, really sound idea. And it worked! CrossCommerce was even developing methods that would scan the page that held the shelf and based on that content analysis automatically generate appropriate products. AdSense, but with products instead of ads. And again it actually worked!

Now why in the world would such a brilliant idea, that was backed up with an actual working execution, built on an insanely robust and expensive technology platform, with strong implementation with product suppliers (which even handled the drop-shipping and logistics!), and financed to the tune of like $60MM+ fail?

Well, for one thing this all happened around 2000. The dot-com bubble was bursting so there was a general downward momentum. What was amazing to witness first-hand as I was on the front lines in sales was the number of these content sites that had zero plans on how to make money and as far as I could tell didn’t care if they ever made money! It was pure insanity and obviously most of them died unquiet deaths.

Next, this was before blogs and other sources of easily-generated content. It was still the days of build your own websites or large, expensive content management solutions. So there were nowhere near the number of sites looking to make money with a completly turn-key, self administered e-commerce solution. And it also did not have the amazing phenominom of the social-networking tidal wave going for it either.

Then the complete and total mis-management of just about every possible opportunity that came up didn’t help either. Ego and hubris don’t work well during crisis times. I won’t go into that in any more detail because it was the same story pretty much as every other dot-bomb during that period of time that was run by people with more money that sense. That and people that were promoted from being receptionists in a prior job to a VP of such-and-such. that never helps either.

So anyway, I hope that Cartfly can make a go of it. I believed then, and I still do, that the idea of embedding buying opportunities within content makes an amazing amount of sense. And now that you have the opportunity to leverage the relationships created via all the social-networking platforms, I can see why Cartfly is feeling like they’re onto something big!

Tags:cartfly, contextual commerce, social-networking