A Blog by Jonathan Low

 

Oct 27, 2012

Digital Does Delivery: Google's New Same Day Service Trial Signals Web's Next Era

Convergence between the ephemeral and the quotidian has been slow in coming. The seamless transition from one to the other is the promise of the emergent mobile commerce.

But in many cases, the hand-off is kludgy, awkward, mistake-prone or simply non-existent. Companies like Amazon have invested relentlessly in perfecting the order-to-delivery process, but time and distance remain a barrier.

Consumers have signalled through their eager proffers of personal data, answers to surveys and credit cards that they will pay handsomely, sometimes extravagantly for convenience. Companies get this, but progress on breaching the next barrier, same day delivery, has been mixed.

Google's new trial suggests that the pressure to deliver almost instantaneously is being met - at least experimentally - with earnest attempts to satisfy the demand.
The strategic imperative is to blunt Amazon's inexorable growth as the emerchant of choice. The challenge is to execute the strategy in such a way that it does not bleed the company profits, rendering it inoperable like all too many victims of the dotcom crash.

Google's resources dwarf those of Webvan and some of the historic brotherhood of failed ecommerce enterprises. But as with so many experiments of this type, experience and reality may alter even the best laid plans. JL

Stacey Higginbothom reports in GigaOm:
The online world and the real world still don’t meet in many places. But with same-day delivery Google may be trying to understand how to make those two worlds mesh, while also improving it’s ability to track how well its ads work The web used to live online, but thanks to services such as Uber, TaskRabbit and Google’s test of same-day delivery we’re increasingly able to take action on the web that delivers near-immediate results in the physical world. This is a slow and ongoing shift that takes the internet beyond a mere distribution engine for digital content and makes it the first stop in a more efficient distribution system for physical goods.

Businesses have long tried to harness the web’s convenience and efficiency to move physical goods and services. Things like online ticketing, appointment booking and even shopping all let people take care of tasks when they want and where they want. But the newer crop of services are trying to close the gap between online action to real-world gratification.

As the New York Times covered on Friday evening, Google is testing a same-day delivery service. From the post:

Though the service propels Google into commerce, the company does not intend to operate warehouses or a shipping service but to team up with retailers and delivery companies. Several San Francisco retailers, including national chains, are participating in the program already.

For shoppers, the service means they can avoid the trouble of driving to the store and some of the wait for items ordered online.

The article notes that Google’s rationale for getting into this business are somewhat unclear, although it maybe be as simple as meeting rival Amazon on its own turf. It may also be Google’s attempts to understand what will become the next logical leap for the web in a way that doesn’t require it to build out a physical distribution network. In all walks of life our physical world and online worlds are converging, so it makes sense to try to understand how that might happen, and where the limitations and points of friction are.

And as the article points out, once Google starts delivering products it can track the effectiveness of its ads from the initial click all the way into a users’ home — once again bridging the divide between the online and physical realms, and perhaps boosting the amount it could charge for ads. During the third quarter Google was walloped with a 20 percent drop in profits in part from declining ad costs.

However, I’m old enough to remember Kozmo, which allowed users in cities to order a movie or ice cream and get it an hour later as well as other experiments in same-day delivery. But Kozmo, like many others of the dot-com era, failed to make enough money to cover their costs. One hopes that Google’s efforts here have a real business model or rationale, or this next logical leap for the internet aren’t going to pan out.

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