By Fadi Shuman

1 - Web free.0

Creating bespoke ecommerce platforms can be a painful, time-consuming and costly process. This is why so many people are choosing open source system Magento (www.magentocommerce.com) as the backbone of their ecommerce offering.

Magento has over 60,000 users at present and handles around £50 billion worth of transactions a year. And with a vast social programming community around it, creating different modules for the system – some of which are free others paid for – it can pretty much do anything you would ever want from an ecommerce package, and will continue to evolve as new technologies come into the market place.

2 - Crowd Commerce

Today, retailers cannot ignore peer-to-peer recommendations and their power to create word of mouth. The most obvious manifestation of this is on-site product reviews, which have proved a fantastic driver for conversion rates. However, beyond this, some sites are appearing that are giving consumers the power to dictate to the manufacturers what they want and not the other way round.

Made.com is a website dedicated to helping people buy furniture at massive discounts from the high street. One item is designed on paper, priced and put on the website. People can review and rate the designer and their build quality and then place an order for it. Once enough people have pre-ordered the item, it will go into production.

nakedwines.com is a group of 20,000 normal wine drinkers, who support 22 winemakers, to make wines exclusively for them. Because the community supports winemakers directly, they can save an average of 33% as they are not paying to be sold to. An active community on the site helps people stay informed about the quality of those winemakers.

3 - Online/Offline

Increasingly, the online and offline worlds are working seamlessly together. An excellent example of this is supermarketsarah.com. Sarah has taken her Portobello Road Market stall and placed it online. Her website has become a shop window from which everything is for sale. Every month she has a new window display online and she has become so famous that she now has guest celebrities designing her window display for her. She used to have 100 people walk passed her store, now she has 10,000 visit her every week.

4 - Me-tail

Anyone can now become an online retailer. Systems such as Vendr (www.vendr.com) allow you to build an ecommerce store in 15 minutes. Furthermore, where taking payments may once have been considered a problem, things are changing quickly. Vendr works with both Google Checkout and Paypal and the arrival of systems like Square (http://squareup.com), which allows you to accept payments anywhere providing you have a smart phone or an iPad, means the barriers to ecommerce are coming down.

5 - Mag Commerce

We believe the iPad will transform how we integrate with magazines, and as such will have a huge effect on ecommerce. Although at present limited to titles like Wired and iGizmo, once more consumer-focused titles like Grazia and Elle launch on the iPad we are likely to see the rise of a whole new range of engaging and immersive web-based publications, with direct links to ecommerce. Instead of looking though a magazine and seeing a pair of shoes or piece of furniture that you like and making a mental note to look at the website at some point, you can click on the product, go to the website instantly and buy the product immediately.

6 - Mcommerce

One of the most exciting things to happen to mobile ecommerce is the arrival of geo-location applications like Foursquare or Gowalla, which allow your mobile to track where you are and then let your friends see that information. This sort of technology has potentially huge implications for ecommerce, such as brands being able to send you offers when you are in the vicinity of their stores. As an indication of how important this could be, Nike is currently investing more money into this tool than in bricks and mortar shops.

Another potentially game-changing technology is Google Shopper. Although currently only available as a Beta on the Android phone in the US, it allows users to take pictures of products, scan barcodes or speak products names into their phones, before being presented with everything from reviews to the cheapest online prices for that specific product. Used in conjunction with geo location technology it can also direct you to the cheapest stockist.

7 - Distributed Commerce

We fully expect distributed commerce to have a powerful effect on online retail over the next one to two years. Tools like Cartfly are already on the market and allow users to sell any product on any site. Essentially, Cartfly provides you with the necessary code to embed your product information and shopping cart on sites ranging from Facebook to LinkedIn and for these sites to be automatically updated with new product details as and when they arise. Taking the pain out of handling multiple sales channels means etailers can get as big a coverage as possible without the hassle.

8 - Social Commerce

Although Facebook hasn’t yet designed it’s own ecommerce platform, there are a number of developers trying. Most of the systems currently available people to browse product information in Facebook, but still force them off site to complete their purchase. But it won’t be long before this changes, and we believe Alvenda (www.alvenda.com) is the company to watch

Conclusion

The ecommerce landscape is getting more distributed, more social, more global and much more complicated and your ecommerce strategy must go way beyond website, search, email, affiliate and social in order to keep you ahead of the game. This will be crucial to the success of any online retailer in the future.

About the author

Fadi Shuman is co-founder of Pod1.