A couple of days ago, there were headlines declaring that fashion has eclipsed technology as the most popular e-tailing category. It's about time. I can remember back in about 1995, when "e-tailing" was a new and sexy word, and everyone was writing about buying stuff in their pajamas and the traditional newspapers were posting the inevitable warnings of it not being safe. I was working with my first online retailer, a start-up named Virtual Vineyards and the founder and I were manning a small booth at a conference in New York City. Next to us was another pioneer retailer. I think they were called Amazon.com.
I chatted with some guy named Bezos who told me that the challenge would be to get everyday people to buy online and we would know that was happening only when consumer goods outpaced computer sales online. It turned out that selling books online was a more lucrative idea then selling artisan-produced wines online and the Bezos guy did pretty well.
But still the #1 item online for an entire decade has been computers.
I don't know know if this observation is politically correct or not, but guys buy computers and cars. Women buy shoes and accessories. Bezos, was fortune because both men and women buy the stuff his very large store now sells.
For a decade, I've been wondering when the tables would turn. Back in 2000, Pew observed that the surge of women online would change the Internet and would change what happened there because women were more social than men. In 2004, Shop.org listed a barrage of statistics that would argue the Internet was the eCommerce purview of women and that this was altogether fitting because women did the shopping.
Now, in 2007, we finally see evidence that a trend that is nearly a decade old is proving to be true. Perhaps it took so long because computers have cost so much more than shoes or handbags. Perhaps it is because computers are lasting a little longer now that so many of the requirements are moving online.
The buying power of women online is rising. When you look at demographic breakdowns, you discover, that in higher age categories, the people who shop online are men, and when you look at younger age categories the shoppers are female. Selecting a 30-year-old woman for a customer seems a wiser course than trying to sell to a 60-year-old guy.
And the success for companies focusing on marketing may be on the hot path. Take Riya, for example, a company I helped position as a photo search company when it launched in Fall 2005. The media loved them. The blogosphere loved them. The problem was after the first wave of coverage and adoration, they found they had very few repeat customers. They went back to the drawing board repositioned themselves, coming back out of the box as Like.com, a visual shopping network aimed at women who wanted to find something to buy that looked like a garment or accessory in a photo. I have no current data, but I am told that response has been strong and growth seems to be ongoing.
Most recently, I've been involved with Scrapblog who just went live a few weeks ago. Slightly to their surprise is that three-fourths of their users are younger women who are using the service to creatively share personal milestones with a small handful of friends and family. This has changed the company's thinking and its opportunities. First, there's a whole lot of companies offline and on, who want to market to young women, and they seem to be lining up with business partnership offers. Second, Scrapblog can adjust its marketing to this identifiable group and third it can begin to design new content and features to this group.
These are just two examples that I am close to. I'm certain there are a great deal more. It has very much surprised me that it has taken this long for women to outspend men in the online marketplace. But then things always take longer than I think they will. By now, I thought blogging would be about as common as using a telephone. It is not. But I remain convinced it will be. Its just going to take longer than I had thought.
