by Will Schreiber

E-commerce and iCommerce

E-commerce is like Michael Jordan when he played for the wizards. Sport-defining. Dominant. But increasingly average in a world of quicker, stronger Kobe’s.

E-commerce was our first attempt at digitizing the store. We took pictures of all the products in Wal-mart and stocked the internet’s infinite shelf space.

I don’t mean to diminish the excitement of discovering obscure books with the help of obscure reviews and having that book show up on the doorstep. Online shopping is dope.

But tapping around Safari with two thumbs on a 4″ screen is tedious.

So while we all loved bidding on Ebay for fun in 2004, nobody is surfing the web anymore. Don’t believe me?

This is the #1 app on laptops:

Chrome

This is the #1 app on phones:

Messages

We spend less than 1 out of every 10 minutes in Safari on our phones (our desktop usage is a mirror image). The rest of the time, we’re scrolling through apps, taking pictures, and texting our friends and our coworkers.

We’re fully in the iMessage era. Yet every business is building stores the same way we did when ‌You’ve Got Mail wasn’t just a movie.

iCommerce is the process of optimizing stores for the noisy world of tap-tap-tap and Instagram attention spans.