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Living in a post e-commerce and m-commerce world, "a-commerce" is taking the lead. A-commerce, or rather automated commerce, combines personal electronic data along with predictive analytics to automatically shop for what the consumer wants and sending it when the consumer needs. Customers are outsourcing the ‘shopping’ process (hunting, negotiation, purchasing, delivery arrangements) to services and sites that they’ve learned to trust. Examples even include financial services like Digit to help save money. In the end, this trend is about shifting towards a world in which you’ll be selling to algorithms as well as humans.
For the busy lifestyle: Shoppers with more important things to do – and that’s all of them – will embrace the outsourcing of certain retail experiences to algorithms and smart devices. Especially the things that have become routine: things we need to do, have to do or get out of the way. With the rise of prime and Amazon Dash, millions have started outsourcing financial decisions. For the busy parent, going to the grocery store last minute for her kids’ lunches for the week. Family food brands can play a role in a-commerce by automatically sending items once a week for them to put in their kids’ lunch boxes. For this convenience, parents won’t have to think twice.
For the particular lifestyle: People with specific preferences and tastes would benefit greatly from a-commerce as well. Having what they want, when they need it is important to this kind of lifestyle. The solution? Automatic commerce. For example, lawyers often have particular ways of doing things. Say they prefer to use a specific brand of a pen over any other pen. And, they want to have these pens in the office at all times. To assure this, the brand can provide a-commerce so that pens ship to their firm every other month. Beyond making his want and need possible, the brand can show their appreciation by implementing a loyalty program. For the committed branded pen user, this program could include discounts on buying pens in bulk and free pens every now and then.
For the bot lifestyle: With the advance of technology, companies and consumers are generating more and more data. Algorithms use this data to define actions of humans, they are pieces of software that are extremely good at very specific actions, much better than humans are. Therefore, when selling to algorithms you need to collect and store lots of data, and not just any kind of data but high-quality data for valuable results. Low-involvement products should be investing in more data to tailor to algorithms, understand the points of influence of bots and what their sources of data are.
How can YOUR brand benefit from a-commerce?