7 ms·

The sudden death of the website?

90 points by helloworld 9y ago

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majormajor 9y ago
I'm not sure companies will forgo websites entirely, but "dumb" websites is a trend I think will continue. I doubt many people do anything on the Snapchat website, for instance. I expect media to continue to move to TVs and dedicated apps, and the reasons outlined by the author for commerce to move away from the open web are somewhat convincing, as well. Looking at my own behavior, I usually search Amazon before Google when I want to buy something - take that trend further and searching the web, vs searching an app store, becomes less and less important for business. In the happy version of this scenario, the web returns to being a great place for text and knowledge storage. There will be ads as long as there are eyeballs, but if the number of eyeballs drops again, does the reason to create clickbait and other purely-ad/eyeball-driven "content" drop too? But compared to the author, I think it has a lot more to do with phones and devices, and the needs to create experiences aimed at them, than Google. Who wants to sit on the couch with a laptop instead of an iPad? Who wants to use a mobile website instead of a dedicated app? Even what looks like a super-thin wrapper (the Amazon app) is still a nicer experience than using amazon.com on a tablet or phone.
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koverda 9y ago
Not buying it from this guy. He says things are going to move to conversational commerce? Alexa at best can re-order something that I've bought before. If I need a new product, the amount of information and comparison that I do (as well as checking reviews) doesn't lead well to a conversational model. It's not like we walk into a B&M store and just talk to a salesperson. We examine the products, the packaging, the information presented about those products, we look around near by and see what else in a similar category is in the store. Conversational commerce moves to an even lower bandwidth information transfer. With websites we can absorb way more info than we can with a chat bot. At best it will augment current experiences. Maybe I'm wrong, and there are some products that are well suited to this model, but I'm failing to come up with any.
- OtterCoder 9y ago
  I hate conversations when I'm shopping. If a chipper salesperson walks over and starts chatting me up or making small talk, I will immediately turn around and walk out, and I'm an extrovert. I want to look at price, price per unit/spec, hold the thing if quality is relevant, then make a purchase. The less you pitch to me, the more likely I'll buy.
  - sunseb 9y ago
    I agree. There is this marketing principle: people love to buy, but hate to be sold.
  - dazc 9y ago
    'I will immediately turn around and walk out...' I worked in retail over 20 years ago and this is one of the first lessons I learned. If somebody wants help making a buying decision they will, usually, come and ask for it. If you let someone look around and walk out without bothering them they'll often come back later and buy something. It may be in the next hour or the next week or the next month but (assuming you have something people want) they do come back. I'm not saying completely ignore them, a simple 'hello' or 'how's it going?' will suffice. If they don't ever come back the place has got bigger problems than the salesman can fix. Of course there are exceptions where people are pressured into buying something they didn't want to buy. They're the outliers that drive this kind of perverse retail policy. But you can guarantee these people only ever buy once. Some of this is applicable to e-commerce today. Annoying chat boxes, false discounting and time limited offers are just another way of forcing a sale at the cost of building a long-term relationship.
leeoniya 9y ago
there's something to be said about a predictable experience. no one needs checkout buttons on the left and mystery meat navigation [1] for the sake of being unique. i personally don't want a MySpace or Geocities shopping experience. brick and mortar stores are also not that different for the same reason. our avg purchase online is $500 and a phone purchase avg is closer to $1,000. we're happy when customers call so we can further differentiate ourselves from our competitors. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation
- bsder 9y ago
  And yet the mystery meat hamburger menu is now the standard on mobile.
  - leeoniya 9y ago
    unfortunate, but it's more-or-less known/standard now.
anfilt 9y ago
This article is verges a bit much the ad side for the author. However, part me like the idea of a lot fluffy commerce stuff leaving the internet and it just being a giant library of information. However, that's not happening especially since a lot commerce websites also post information. I also don't see how chat functionality would cause such a shift? If you are wanting to reduce the amount questions your website is generating maybe add more content to it. I hate how so many "modern designed" websites are so light on information. They just end up as fancy brochures with little to no information. Give me data sheets, give me all the details I could possible want about your product/s.
- b1daly 9y ago
  I’ve assumed the trend away from high content websites was driven by the need for responsive, phone friendly sites. There is so little screen real estate available, that design considerations lead to these websites that are a big pretty picture, with a little bit of marketing fluff text.
fireismyflag 9y ago
>As Google made it easier to find the world’s information, it also started to dictate the rules through the PageRank algorithm, which forced companies to design their websites in a certain way Page rank is not dictated by website design, and it's not the reason many websites share the same components... UX is, we have found the proven path and following it makes it easier for our users. Los of other valuable criticism in the site's own comments as well...
Klathmon 9y ago
This seems... Very out of touch. The author makes the argument that all websites look the same because of Google, but never really gives a reason why... (besides name dropping "PageRank" once) Then it goes on to say that same experience (or more accurately the lack of a "unique" experience) is why they have poor conversion rates. Then it blames the website for causing an increased spending in customer service, pointing to this as the reason why they think brands will start "closing" their websites. But every step of the way I think the author is way off. Websites don't look like that because Google's "PageRank" is forcing them to somehow, and that look and feel isn't the reason why conversions are bad. In my opinion, websites look like that because a useful website follows some guidelines, and that may make it look "bland" but at least I know to look for my "cart" at the top-right of the page (or even have the concept of a "cart"). Also, I think the reason why conversions are bad is because retailers looked at the web for years as an afterthought. The reason only a handful of large companies are doing well on the web is because so few treated it as well as they treat their storefronts. You can't treat the internet as an afterthought, you need to build your business around it. Amazon, eBay, Overstock, and others have done this, they spent the time, money, and engineering to do it right, and do it fast. Someone like Nike throws something slow and cumbersome to use together as an afterthought just to have one. If websites start closing, it's not because of the "big bad google", it's because ecommerce is hard, just like how some online-only or online-first companies are now finding out how hard brick-and-mortar really is.
- JoshMnem 9y ago
  It's a dystopian prediction. The WWW is what makes the Internet great. If a company would take down their website, they would lose a lot of customers, including me. I don't use Facebook and only use a few mobile apps. I'm also looking for a way to get rid of my smartphone.
- natecavanaugh 9y ago
  Thank you! This guy dismisses conventional UX as some sort of bad thing while starting out saying that everyone's unique experience was a huge headache in the early web. And the a huge reason why Google even took off was because of how completely bland it's experience was. I'm not saying there aren't things that need to be improved, but the sudden death of the website? Oh, cmon.
davemel37 9y ago
I think everyone is thinking about chatbots and conversational interfaces backwards. Consumers should be the ones building chatbots to talk to brands not vice versa. The brands can use NLP and AI to partially automate much of the conversation, but it needs to be consumer driven... too much of the promise of chatbots requires breaking down barriers and as long as brands control their own experience and every bot is siloed, the real pain of consumers and current ecommerce wont be solved... Too much of technology today is focused on optimizing businesses and ends up the end users. Online advertising is a protection racket where publishers steal and hold customers hostage and sell them to the highest bidder...all the middleware is optimized around grabbing your piece of the advertising pie without caring about the end users or the advertisers...in the meantime, its just driving up costs to deliver value... We need a buyer driven market...we need long term visionaries who stop optimizing to business revenue and cost savings and optimize to GROWING THE OVERALL MARKET!!! optimize to what really serves customers and advertisers instead of these short aighted plays solving problems the previous startup created... We wouldnt need facebook ads if our competitors werent reaching our customers on google and we wouldnt need content marketing if publishers actually tried to serve advertisers instead of just trying to drive up their costs... These companies are thinking about everything backwards imho.
- lsc 9y ago
  >Consumers should be the ones building chatbots to talk to brands not vice versa. There was a lot of sci-fi ish talk, back in the day, about 'agents' or 'smart personal agents' or thinks like that; where we'd all have a team of semi-intelligent bots that would go off and do things on our behalf. It's interesting that we kinda have some of this now, but as you say, it's reversed; the agents are owned by the company that is trying to sell us something, so rather than negotiating for us, they negotiate against us.
- pmontra 9y ago
  > Consumers should be the ones building chatbots to talk to brands not vice versa. I agree with your general feeling, because they should act like invisible friends, looking at us and doing everything we need, best of before we even ask. Unfortunately it looks as feasible as "consumers should be the ones building a search engine to index the internet". Impossible unless some company offers it to them as a service, best if at no (apparent) cost. My dream in the 90s before the web was to get an assistant running on my hardware at home, somehow getting info about the world and talking to me. After the web it become clear that the assistant would have to interface the web and after the mobile phone (think old Nokias) its interface would be that. After the smartphone there would be a camera, a microphone, GPS, other sensors that I could trust because they would be sending data to my hardware and my software, not to some company that wants to exploit me. Unfortunately I worked on something else (web development) which was more profitable to me and everybody else did the same. We have things like Own Cloud but no Own Alexa. What we'll get in the next year are better versions of centralized services like Google Now, Alexa and Siri. Centralized services that we can't trust to behave in our best interest.
Wehrdo 9y ago
It seems like this guy is trying to advocate for conversational interfaces (what a surprise, given his company). They were all the rage 1-2 years ago, and I think right now we're probably in the "Trough of disillusionment" in the Hype Cycle. I wonder if the author is simply behind everyone else on the curve and harboring unrealistic expectations, or truly sees where that technology will fit into our lives. Given his prediction of a "major website" shutting down this year, I would lean more towards disillusionment. I think many are coming to the conclusion that proper natural language understanding will require more than just a deep feed-forward network with back-propagation.
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osrec 9y ago
A bold prediction. Don't think it'll come true. I do think that the way we discover answers to our questions online will change though. I'm not saying Google's days are numbered, but it's about time we saw some additional innovation in this space. Google has this underlying requirement to continually bolster ad revenue before releasing tech, and I feel this actually stifles it's ability to innovate in the search space...
bsder 9y ago
The most fascinating thing from that article, to me, is the fact that a website creates MORE phone traffic, not less. That seems like an interesting wedge for some company that actually cares about customer service.
- bewo001 9y ago
  Phone traffic on the whole has peaked recently, at least in western countries. If websites caused more calls, this should not have happened.
  - jacksmith21006 9y ago
    I seriously doubt that is true and would love to see a source? I do supect it has slowed but hard to image that data used by mobile does not continue to increase until or unless something replaces phones. Data plan continue to get cheaper and areas with data increase and speeds increase all point to increased use. I know now when I have to sit around waiting for my kids to finish practice I am using data like I never used before. We now have YouTube TV and I might catch up in the news as I wait instead of reading a book. Btw, love YouTube TV. Best Google product there is.
    - bewo001 9y ago
      It's about telephony traffic, not data traffic from phones. Some national regulators publish the numbers every year. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/past-point-peak-telephony-dean-bubley https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/past-point-peak-telephony-dea... has some discussion and links.
localcdn 9y ago
Who do I get in touch with to subtly promote my company with a piece on TechCrunch?
- dsign 9y ago
  Judging by the article, they don't do "subtly".
t0mbstone 9y ago
Google didn't kill e-commerce. Amazon killed it. People are sick of creating accounts on every single web site out there. Who wants to enter your credit card info on some random web site? How do you know if you can trust them? And then, when you do successfully place an order, you end up having to pay shipping and handling, and it doesn't come for two weeks. Compare that to one click shopping on amazon.com, and one-day free shipping. Independent e-commerce sites just can't compete with that.
- dingaling 9y ago
  In no country does Amazon have more than 40% online market share and in many it is far lower; 16% in the UK for example. Other retailers can compete on many aspects; for example in the UK Amazon is completely locked-out of online groceries by the big supermarkets. Or hobby specialists who know their market well, a UK example being Hannants who work closely with the model-kit industry. And most other retailers don't require an annual fee for decent service, such as dispatching within a week...
  - dazc 9y ago
    'in the UK Amazon is completely locked-out of online groceries by the big supermarkets.' Last year I was due to return from Spain on Christmas eve. Tesco, Waitrose, etc were not accepting any orders for about 3 days before. I had no such problems with amazon. I think it will be a while before I buy groceries on a regular basis from amazon but I wouldn't be surprised if I was in 5 years time? 'And most other retailers don't require an annual fee for decent service, such as dispatching within a week...' Yeah, I get that 'preparing for dispatch' bull sometimes too and it is quite annoying. Sometimes cancelling and re-ordering fixes it but you have to be quick before the window shuts.
- adventured 9y ago
  Nobody killed ecommerce. Amazon is not going to have a majority share of all ecommerce. As the total market expands, doubling in the next decade, Amazon's share will decline. Amazon has a very early lead due to having invested more heavily into it, and sooner, than any other major retailer. Despite being a quarter century in, this is still early into the shift to ecommerce in the US and most developed economies (eg only 6% of retail sales in Italy are online). Online is all that Amazon was. It makes sense they'd have an outsized position at this point versus everybody else. They're benefiting from that aggressive early mover advantage (it took Walmart 20 years just to get an effective online strategy going, probably because they rested on their laurels, as most giants do; and now their online sales are booming). Amazon isn't going to be a trillion dollar sales company, their current ecommerce market share is not going to hold. The fear, paranoia, propaganda, etc. is very overblown at this stage. We're at peak Amazon mania, similar to Microsoft mania in the late 1990s when Microsoft was going to own everything and each proclamation about them conquering the planet was breathlessly read and believed. Here's the reality of Amazon: they're the latest Walmart, which was the latest Sears. It's meaningless. They're a great retailer, and some day 20 years into the future there will be a superior retailer that supplants them. Amazon retail is a giant online catalog of goods & services. Building it up into something more than what it is, doesn't make sense. Online isn't special.
550r 9y ago
It doesn't seem that long there were plenty of people predicting that mobile apps were also going to render websites obsolete, but that didn't really happen, at least nothing like the extent that was predicted. In fact most of the main app only experiences like instagram have ended up creating web interfaces anyway. Maybe it will eventually happen but this article predicts some major brands shutting down their websites this year, which is like saying cryptocurrencies will start replacing cash in some major western countries this year. The only real value I can see in a brand shutting down it's website for a chatbot only service right now is the the free publicity they will get for doing so. Websites are normally relatively cheap to run so there is no real reason to kill them off unless it's getting no traffic compared to the chatbot channels and from my own experiences in this area, chatbots aren't even close to website use yet (but I am in Australia, where things like Alexa and Google Home are quite new in the market compared to the US).
GedByrne 9y ago
Alexa is still struggling to understand what Album I want to listen to from my rather limited music library. She won’t be replacing the Amazon website anytime soon.
hrasyid 9y ago
> The brand will shift how it connects with consumers — to conversations, with a combination of bots and humans, through a messaging front end like SMS or Facebook. We are already working with several large brands to make this a reality. This is arguably happening in third world countries. At least in Indonesia (which I'm familiar with), a lot of new businesses don't bother with websites but relied on things like Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp (coincidentally these are own by the same guy) to reach out to customers and get orders.
- b1daly 9y ago
  In such a purchase flow model, where are customers placing their orders? Meaning, are they driving traffic to a general ecommerce site like Amazon?
  - hrasyid 9y ago
    No, just via chat/PM
georgeoliver 9y ago
Less than 15% of direct sales is through ecommerce, but I'd bet a good fraction of RL dollars spent is a direct result of an app or website.
dsign 9y ago
What this guy says makes no sense whatsoever... for anybody that knows a peanut about the matter. But he is speaking to business types, and among those, technical knowledge is less prevalent. Probably he wants to start another meme infection of "the web is going to die" among investors and business analysts...
sunseb 9y ago
Remember how hard we had to fight pop-ups back in the good old days ? I find funny that this guy is selling this exact idea.
jschwartzi 9y ago
Try buying a pair of pants that you like through a "conversational interface," and then get back to me when you figure out what the problem is.
kaoD 9y ago
I don't want conversations. I want information. If the info is already missing in a web page I fail to see how a virtual salesperson saying "well, I don't know" is going to sell better. Case in point: I'm cleaning up a house to live in and we need a new kitchen sink. The problem is there was already one there so we want to buy a replacement that is bigger than the current cut out in the counter and also fits nicely with the pipe installation. Searching for a sink online has been a nightmare: if there are schematics (which are often missing) there is always some key information left out like the depth of the bowl. This includes the king of online retail: Amazon lists package size and nothing else. When was the last time the package size influenced your purchase? Buying in person hasn't been much better and the prices are almost double! At least I can bring my measuring tape and do the schematics myself, though I still hate getting pitched by salespeople that often know much less than me after a 20-min online research. In the end we're going for the cheapest one that has a reasonable return policy. Who cares about the more expensive ones if, for all I know, the only difference is their aesthetics? This is such a common pattern I started dreading buying online. I'm tired of hunting for the specs on Google. That's the shop's only job! IMHO the article is nothing more than an advertisement for the author's business. Maybe he's sure of the paradigm shift but I'm definitely not because an actually useful conversational assistant requires both competence, effort and, more importantly, exposes the seller to risks (official information = contractual obligation, which is IMHO the reason you will not get the answers IRL or via customer support either).
EngineerBetter 9y ago
As someone who remembers the usability horrors of the 90s as wr stumbled our way to figuring out what worked, I think the author is misidentifying the issue. Websites work just fine now - the issue is Amazon having an economy of scale and business model whereby they almost all other e-commerce sites are an irrelevance.
manmal 9y ago
When it comes to e-Commerce, maybe we should rather listen to people who are actually managing a store. Tony Hsieh of Zappos has written a wonderful book about customer care, and it all boils down to getting in touch with the customer as MUCH as possible. Everytime a customer calls in, that’s a chance for you to create a positive experience for them, and they are more likely to become repeat customers. Without this, you become interchangeable. The very moment Amazon is superseded by another retailer with similar prices and return policy, I will change to them - I feel no loyalty towards them. That’s not the case with my local supermarket, where I know all the cashiers and there is this feeling of personal familiarity. So phone calls are not necessarily the problem - maybe digital sales automation is the problem.
- Animats 9y ago
  Tony Hsieh of Zappos has written a wonderful book about customer care, and it all boils down to getting in touch with the customer as MUCH as possible. He runs a shoe store. I never, ever, want a shoe store to "get in touch" with me.
  - manmal 9y ago
    Customers get in touch with Zappos, not vice versa. But Zappos don't consider this a nuisance, but as a chance to wow the customer.
Animats 9y ago
Some commerce sites do have complicated problems. Ones where there are size and color options, but not all sizes and color combinations are available, have user interface problems. Car parts sites are getting good. They mostly now take the make and model of your car, and then give you a site that only shows items for that model. Industrial parts sites, especially for electronics, range from excellent to terrible. They have huge catalogs of very specific parts, and you need a specialized search engine to navigate them. Those things are not conversational; they're table driven.
- perl4ever 9y ago
  I am finding that for many things, there is someone who's occupied a niche with a great website and catalog, and looking for the same stuff on Amazon or eBay will turn up mediocrity, garbage, or nothing. But if you don't do some research on the specs of what you want to buy, you easily get funneled into Amazon. For instance, I wanted a cable for my printer. If I look on Amazon for XYZ printer cable, they will happily sell me one. It's very easy to find something when you do a simple minded search. But actually, it is a generic cable, and Amazon's listings have simply been spammed with every printer model name in creation. When I realized that, I went to a site that specializes in cables, and looked for a product based on the connector types. Doing that gave me real choices (such as the cable length, whether it has a ferrite core, etc.), detailed specs, and on top of that, much cheaper prices. The specific retailer or specialty doesn't matter - my point is that I am getting into (and advocate) the mindset that when I want something and it's not available locally, I start by thinking "I know someone is making a living by outdoing Amazon in a particular niche - how can I find their website?" Other random examples include chocolate and kitchen equipment. The effectiveness of Amazon as a baseline means, I think, that anyone with a thriving online business has to be something special these days.
mattlondon 9y ago
I'd argue that conversational interfaces for retail would only be good for standardised commodities - 6 medium hens eggs, a pack of 10 M6 screws, a ream of A4 paper etc - i.e. stuff that you don't care about the brand or specifics, you just need some eggs etc. Websites could do A LOT better by concentrating on putting better product info on their site: proper high res pictures from multiple angles (e.g. for products in boxes, show me every side of the box that I can zoom in and read the text on), descriptions that aren't just copy-paste marketing B.S., and proper measurements/sizes/specifications. That'd go a long way toward reducing confused shoppers having to call a help centre... Personally, if I have to talk to someone at a store (online or not), they've already started to annoy me. I just want to get my stuff then carry on with the more important things in life. Plus what is it about chatbots that is getting people so excited? Anyone that has an Alexa or Google home will tell you they are frustrating and irritating to use and a long way away from doing anything useful apart from trivial stuff like setting kitchen timers or stilted and excruciatingly awkward question-answer settings.
z3t4 9y ago
Yeh, well organised (library like) online stores suck. I rather buy my stuff by communicating with a sales person via SMS messages ...
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pedalpete 9y ago
Off topic, but does the $500B total global advertising spend sound wrong to anybody else? I'm seeing reports of that number, but that seems incredibly low to me. Google made $95B in advertising revenue in 2017, can they really be almost 1/5th of the entire global advertising spend?
pif 9y ago
1 - HTML was meant for static content and e-commerce never was about static content. Wow, who could have thought about this? 2 - Humans like human conversation. Oh, the biggest surprise! Jeez, I learnt two things today!
dwheeler 9y ago
This is a nonsense ad for someone's services. I don't want websites to work totally differently from each other, nor does anyone else. Instead, I want to be able to find the information that I want, or be able to quickly acquire the services I want. There's a false premise about brick-and-mortar stores here too. Brick-and-mortar stores aren't radically different from each other either,; I expect doors to look like doors, windows to look like windows, and when I look for the bathroom I should be able to figure out how to use it. The notion that every website has to look radically different from each other is nonsense from people who are too excited about making new designs instead of wanting to help other people. Let's let's have fewer fads and more thinking about people, please.
- FussyZeus 9y ago
  The author I'm pretty sure never even mentioned trust, which is a big reason I stick to Amazon. You never know who on earth or what hackneyed system is on the other end of a credit card form. I like the fact that Amazon lets me order with my voice, and I like the fact that Amazon lets me order from any number of millions of merchants without fear of my credit card getting stolen (or at least, less fear than usual). The few times I checkout at other random websites I always use PayPal to avoid giving away valuable info.
kyledrake 9y ago
> I am going to make a bold prediction: In 2018, we will see the first major brand shut down its website. If that was a bet, I would put $50,000 down on it not happening.
vikingcaffiene 9y ago
I call BS. The authors predictions are based upon the assertion that people would rather make a phone call than use a website. I acknowledge that maybe I am in a bubble and don't understand the average user but, really?? It seems pretty commonplace for people in my generation (xennial) and those after mine to go out of their way to _avoid_ the phone. I will _always_ use an online communication method if I can. If the argument was that some new tech was coming to blow websites out of the water I could at least try to give it the benefit of the doubt. That's not the premise here and, much like email, many have tried to replace websites. All fail.
- rossdavidh 9y ago
  I am 50 years old, and I also will only resort to phone call as a last resort, when just going to a different website instead is not an option, so I think your point applies not only to youngsters.
  - vikingcaffiene 9y ago
    I was thinking that maybe the author was coming from a place that was out of touch because of coming from a different time but I didn't mean to generalize an entire age group with that. I apologize if that's the way it came off. The bigger point here is that phone calls suck and we all agree. :-)
astura 9y ago
So the hypothesis is that every website looks the same thanks to Google yet, at the same time, nobody can figure out how to use these identical websites so everyone gets on the phone to do business. That's not matched my personal experience, to say the least

90 points by helloworld 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

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I'm not sure companies will forgo websites entirely, but "dumb" websites is a trend I think will continue. I doubt many people do anything on the Snapchat website, for instance. I expect media to continue to move to TVs and dedicated apps, and the reasons outlined by the author for commerce to move away from the open web are somewhat convincing, as well. Looking at my own behavior, I usually search Amazon before Google when I want to buy something - take that trend further and searching the web, vs searching an app store, becomes less and less important for business. In the happy version of this scenario, the web returns to being a great place for text and knowledge storage. There will be ads as long as there are eyeballs, but if the number of eyeballs drops again, does the reason to create clickbait and other purely-ad/eyeball-driven "content" drop too? But compared to the author, I think it has a lot more to do with phones and devices, and the needs to create experiences aimed at them, than Google. Who wants to sit on the couch with a laptop instead of an iPad? Who wants to use a mobile website instead of a dedicated app? Even what looks like a super-thin wrapper (the Amazon app) is still a nicer experience than using amazon.com on a tablet or phone.

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koverda 9y ago

Not buying it from this guy. He says things are going to move to conversational commerce? Alexa at best can re-order something that I've bought before. If I need a new product, the amount of information and comparison that I do (as well as checking reviews) doesn't lead well to a conversational model. It's not like we walk into a B&M store and just talk to a salesperson. We examine the products, the packaging, the information presented about those products, we look around near by and see what else in a similar category is in the store. Conversational commerce moves to an even lower bandwidth information transfer. With websites we can absorb way more info than we can with a chat bot. At best it will augment current experiences. Maybe I'm wrong, and there are some products that are well suited to this model, but I'm failing to come up with any.

OtterCoder 9y ago
I hate conversations when I'm shopping. If a chipper salesperson walks over and starts chatting me up or making small talk, I will immediately turn around and walk out, and I'm an extrovert. I want to look at price, price per unit/spec, hold the thing if quality is relevant, then make a purchase. The less you pitch to me, the more likely I'll buy.
- sunseb 9y ago
  I agree. There is this marketing principle: people love to buy, but hate to be sold.
- dazc 9y ago
  'I will immediately turn around and walk out...' I worked in retail over 20 years ago and this is one of the first lessons I learned. If somebody wants help making a buying decision they will, usually, come and ask for it. If you let someone look around and walk out without bothering them they'll often come back later and buy something. It may be in the next hour or the next week or the next month but (assuming you have something people want) they do come back. I'm not saying completely ignore them, a simple 'hello' or 'how's it going?' will suffice. If they don't ever come back the place has got bigger problems than the salesman can fix. Of course there are exceptions where people are pressured into buying something they didn't want to buy. They're the outliers that drive this kind of perverse retail policy. But you can guarantee these people only ever buy once. Some of this is applicable to e-commerce today. Annoying chat boxes, false discounting and time limited offers are just another way of forcing a sale at the cost of building a long-term relationship.

leeoniya 9y ago

there's something to be said about a predictable experience. no one needs checkout buttons on the left and mystery meat navigation [1] for the sake of being unique. i personally don't want a MySpace or Geocities shopping experience. brick and mortar stores are also not that different for the same reason. our avg purchase online is $500 and a phone purchase avg is closer to $1,000. we're happy when customers call so we can further differentiate ourselves from our competitors. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation

bsder 9y ago
And yet the mystery meat hamburger menu is now the standard on mobile.
- leeoniya 9y ago
  unfortunate, but it's more-or-less known/standard now.

anfilt 9y ago

This article is verges a bit much the ad side for the author. However, part me like the idea of a lot fluffy commerce stuff leaving the internet and it just being a giant library of information. However, that's not happening especially since a lot commerce websites also post information. I also don't see how chat functionality would cause such a shift? If you are wanting to reduce the amount questions your website is generating maybe add more content to it. I hate how so many "modern designed" websites are so light on information. They just end up as fancy brochures with little to no information. Give me data sheets, give me all the details I could possible want about your product/s.

b1daly 9y ago
I’ve assumed the trend away from high content websites was driven by the need for responsive, phone friendly sites. There is so little screen real estate available, that design considerations lead to these websites that are a big pretty picture, with a little bit of marketing fluff text.

fireismyflag 9y ago

>As Google made it easier to find the world’s information, it also started to dictate the rules through the PageRank algorithm, which forced companies to design their websites in a certain way Page rank is not dictated by website design, and it's not the reason many websites share the same components... UX is, we have found the proven path and following it makes it easier for our users. Los of other valuable criticism in the site's own comments as well...

Klathmon 9y ago

This seems... Very out of touch. The author makes the argument that all websites look the same because of Google, but never really gives a reason why... (besides name dropping "PageRank" once) Then it goes on to say that same experience (or more accurately the lack of a "unique" experience) is why they have poor conversion rates. Then it blames the website for causing an increased spending in customer service, pointing to this as the reason why they think brands will start "closing" their websites. But every step of the way I think the author is way off. Websites don't look like that because Google's "PageRank" is forcing them to somehow, and that look and feel isn't the reason why conversions are bad. In my opinion, websites look like that because a useful website follows some guidelines, and that may make it look "bland" but at least I know to look for my "cart" at the top-right of the page (or even have the concept of a "cart"). Also, I think the reason why conversions are bad is because retailers looked at the web for years as an afterthought. The reason only a handful of large companies are doing well on the web is because so few treated it as well as they treat their storefronts. You can't treat the internet as an afterthought, you need to build your business around it. Amazon, eBay, Overstock, and others have done this, they spent the time, money, and engineering to do it right, and do it fast. Someone like Nike throws something slow and cumbersome to use together as an afterthought just to have one. If websites start closing, it's not because of the "big bad google", it's because ecommerce is hard, just like how some online-only or online-first companies are now finding out how hard brick-and-mortar really is.

JoshMnem 9y ago
It's a dystopian prediction. The WWW is what makes the Internet great. If a company would take down their website, they would lose a lot of customers, including me. I don't use Facebook and only use a few mobile apps. I'm also looking for a way to get rid of my smartphone.
natecavanaugh 9y ago
Thank you! This guy dismisses conventional UX as some sort of bad thing while starting out saying that everyone's unique experience was a huge headache in the early web. And the a huge reason why Google even took off was because of how completely bland it's experience was. I'm not saying there aren't things that need to be improved, but the sudden death of the website? Oh, cmon.

davemel37 9y ago

I think everyone is thinking about chatbots and conversational interfaces backwards. Consumers should be the ones building chatbots to talk to brands not vice versa. The brands can use NLP and AI to partially automate much of the conversation, but it needs to be consumer driven... too much of the promise of chatbots requires breaking down barriers and as long as brands control their own experience and every bot is siloed, the real pain of consumers and current ecommerce wont be solved... Too much of technology today is focused on optimizing businesses and ends up the end users. Online advertising is a protection racket where publishers steal and hold customers hostage and sell them to the highest bidder...all the middleware is optimized around grabbing your piece of the advertising pie without caring about the end users or the advertisers...in the meantime, its just driving up costs to deliver value... We need a buyer driven market...we need long term visionaries who stop optimizing to business revenue and cost savings and optimize to GROWING THE OVERALL MARKET!!! optimize to what really serves customers and advertisers instead of these short aighted plays solving problems the previous startup created... We wouldnt need facebook ads if our competitors werent reaching our customers on google and we wouldnt need content marketing if publishers actually tried to serve advertisers instead of just trying to drive up their costs... These companies are thinking about everything backwards imho.

lsc 9y ago
>Consumers should be the ones building chatbots to talk to brands not vice versa. There was a lot of sci-fi ish talk, back in the day, about 'agents' or 'smart personal agents' or thinks like that; where we'd all have a team of semi-intelligent bots that would go off and do things on our behalf. It's interesting that we kinda have some of this now, but as you say, it's reversed; the agents are owned by the company that is trying to sell us something, so rather than negotiating for us, they negotiate against us.
pmontra 9y ago
> Consumers should be the ones building chatbots to talk to brands not vice versa. I agree with your general feeling, because they should act like invisible friends, looking at us and doing everything we need, best of before we even ask. Unfortunately it looks as feasible as "consumers should be the ones building a search engine to index the internet". Impossible unless some company offers it to them as a service, best if at no (apparent) cost. My dream in the 90s before the web was to get an assistant running on my hardware at home, somehow getting info about the world and talking to me. After the web it become clear that the assistant would have to interface the web and after the mobile phone (think old Nokias) its interface would be that. After the smartphone there would be a camera, a microphone, GPS, other sensors that I could trust because they would be sending data to my hardware and my software, not to some company that wants to exploit me. Unfortunately I worked on something else (web development) which was more profitable to me and everybody else did the same. We have things like Own Cloud but no Own Alexa. What we'll get in the next year are better versions of centralized services like Google Now, Alexa and Siri. Centralized services that we can't trust to behave in our best interest.

Wehrdo 9y ago

It seems like this guy is trying to advocate for conversational interfaces (what a surprise, given his company). They were all the rage 1-2 years ago, and I think right now we're probably in the "Trough of disillusionment" in the Hype Cycle. I wonder if the author is simply behind everyone else on the curve and harboring unrealistic expectations, or truly sees where that technology will fit into our lives. Given his prediction of a "major website" shutting down this year, I would lean more towards disillusionment. I think many are coming to the conclusion that proper natural language understanding will require more than just a deep feed-forward network with back-propagation.

deleted 9y ago

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osrec 9y ago

A bold prediction. Don't think it'll come true. I do think that the way we discover answers to our questions online will change though. I'm not saying Google's days are numbered, but it's about time we saw some additional innovation in this space. Google has this underlying requirement to continually bolster ad revenue before releasing tech, and I feel this actually stifles it's ability to innovate in the search space...

bsder 9y ago

The most fascinating thing from that article, to me, is the fact that a website creates MORE phone traffic, not less. That seems like an interesting wedge for some company that actually cares about customer service.

bewo001 9y ago
Phone traffic on the whole has peaked recently, at least in western countries. If websites caused more calls, this should not have happened.
- jacksmith21006 9y ago
  I seriously doubt that is true and would love to see a source? I do supect it has slowed but hard to image that data used by mobile does not continue to increase until or unless something replaces phones. Data plan continue to get cheaper and areas with data increase and speeds increase all point to increased use. I know now when I have to sit around waiting for my kids to finish practice I am using data like I never used before. We now have YouTube TV and I might catch up in the news as I wait instead of reading a book. Btw, love YouTube TV. Best Google product there is.
  - bewo001 9y ago
    It's about telephony traffic, not data traffic from phones. Some national regulators publish the numbers every year. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/past-point-peak-telephony-dean-bubley https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/past-point-peak-telephony-dea... has some discussion and links.

localcdn 9y ago

Who do I get in touch with to subtly promote my company with a piece on TechCrunch?

dsign 9y ago
Judging by the article, they don't do "subtly".

t0mbstone 9y ago

Google didn't kill e-commerce. Amazon killed it. People are sick of creating accounts on every single web site out there. Who wants to enter your credit card info on some random web site? How do you know if you can trust them? And then, when you do successfully place an order, you end up having to pay shipping and handling, and it doesn't come for two weeks. Compare that to one click shopping on amazon.com, and one-day free shipping. Independent e-commerce sites just can't compete with that.

dingaling 9y ago
In no country does Amazon have more than 40% online market share and in many it is far lower; 16% in the UK for example. Other retailers can compete on many aspects; for example in the UK Amazon is completely locked-out of online groceries by the big supermarkets. Or hobby specialists who know their market well, a UK example being Hannants who work closely with the model-kit industry. And most other retailers don't require an annual fee for decent service, such as dispatching within a week...
- dazc 9y ago
  'in the UK Amazon is completely locked-out of online groceries by the big supermarkets.' Last year I was due to return from Spain on Christmas eve. Tesco, Waitrose, etc were not accepting any orders for about 3 days before. I had no such problems with amazon. I think it will be a while before I buy groceries on a regular basis from amazon but I wouldn't be surprised if I was in 5 years time? 'And most other retailers don't require an annual fee for decent service, such as dispatching within a week...' Yeah, I get that 'preparing for dispatch' bull sometimes too and it is quite annoying. Sometimes cancelling and re-ordering fixes it but you have to be quick before the window shuts.
adventured 9y ago
Nobody killed ecommerce. Amazon is not going to have a majority share of all ecommerce. As the total market expands, doubling in the next decade, Amazon's share will decline. Amazon has a very early lead due to having invested more heavily into it, and sooner, than any other major retailer. Despite being a quarter century in, this is still early into the shift to ecommerce in the US and most developed economies (eg only 6% of retail sales in Italy are online). Online is all that Amazon was. It makes sense they'd have an outsized position at this point versus everybody else. They're benefiting from that aggressive early mover advantage (it took Walmart 20 years just to get an effective online strategy going, probably because they rested on their laurels, as most giants do; and now their online sales are booming). Amazon isn't going to be a trillion dollar sales company, their current ecommerce market share is not going to hold. The fear, paranoia, propaganda, etc. is very overblown at this stage. We're at peak Amazon mania, similar to Microsoft mania in the late 1990s when Microsoft was going to own everything and each proclamation about them conquering the planet was breathlessly read and believed. Here's the reality of Amazon: they're the latest Walmart, which was the latest Sears. It's meaningless. They're a great retailer, and some day 20 years into the future there will be a superior retailer that supplants them. Amazon retail is a giant online catalog of goods & services. Building it up into something more than what it is, doesn't make sense. Online isn't special.

550r 9y ago

It doesn't seem that long there were plenty of people predicting that mobile apps were also going to render websites obsolete, but that didn't really happen, at least nothing like the extent that was predicted. In fact most of the main app only experiences like instagram have ended up creating web interfaces anyway. Maybe it will eventually happen but this article predicts some major brands shutting down their websites this year, which is like saying cryptocurrencies will start replacing cash in some major western countries this year. The only real value I can see in a brand shutting down it's website for a chatbot only service right now is the the free publicity they will get for doing so. Websites are normally relatively cheap to run so there is no real reason to kill them off unless it's getting no traffic compared to the chatbot channels and from my own experiences in this area, chatbots aren't even close to website use yet (but I am in Australia, where things like Alexa and Google Home are quite new in the market compared to the US).

GedByrne 9y ago

Alexa is still struggling to understand what Album I want to listen to from my rather limited music library. She won’t be replacing the Amazon website anytime soon.

hrasyid 9y ago

> The brand will shift how it connects with consumers — to conversations, with a combination of bots and humans, through a messaging front end like SMS or Facebook. We are already working with several large brands to make this a reality. This is arguably happening in third world countries. At least in Indonesia (which I'm familiar with), a lot of new businesses don't bother with websites but relied on things like Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp (coincidentally these are own by the same guy) to reach out to customers and get orders.

b1daly 9y ago
In such a purchase flow model, where are customers placing their orders? Meaning, are they driving traffic to a general ecommerce site like Amazon?
- hrasyid 9y ago
  No, just via chat/PM

georgeoliver 9y ago

Less than 15% of direct sales is through ecommerce, but I'd bet a good fraction of RL dollars spent is a direct result of an app or website.

dsign 9y ago

What this guy says makes no sense whatsoever... for anybody that knows a peanut about the matter. But he is speaking to business types, and among those, technical knowledge is less prevalent. Probably he wants to start another meme infection of "the web is going to die" among investors and business analysts...

sunseb 9y ago

Remember how hard we had to fight pop-ups back in the good old days ? I find funny that this guy is selling this exact idea.

jschwartzi 9y ago

Try buying a pair of pants that you like through a "conversational interface," and then get back to me when you figure out what the problem is.

kaoD 9y ago

I don't want conversations. I want information. If the info is already missing in a web page I fail to see how a virtual salesperson saying "well, I don't know" is going to sell better. Case in point: I'm cleaning up a house to live in and we need a new kitchen sink. The problem is there was already one there so we want to buy a replacement that is bigger than the current cut out in the counter and also fits nicely with the pipe installation. Searching for a sink online has been a nightmare: if there are schematics (which are often missing) there is always some key information left out like the depth of the bowl. This includes the king of online retail: Amazon lists package size and nothing else. When was the last time the package size influenced your purchase? Buying in person hasn't been much better and the prices are almost double! At least I can bring my measuring tape and do the schematics myself, though I still hate getting pitched by salespeople that often know much less than me after a 20-min online research. In the end we're going for the cheapest one that has a reasonable return policy. Who cares about the more expensive ones if, for all I know, the only difference is their aesthetics? This is such a common pattern I started dreading buying online. I'm tired of hunting for the specs on Google. That's the shop's only job! IMHO the article is nothing more than an advertisement for the author's business. Maybe he's sure of the paradigm shift but I'm definitely not because an actually useful conversational assistant requires both competence, effort and, more importantly, exposes the seller to risks (official information = contractual obligation, which is IMHO the reason you will not get the answers IRL or via customer support either).

EngineerBetter 9y ago

As someone who remembers the usability horrors of the 90s as wr stumbled our way to figuring out what worked, I think the author is misidentifying the issue. Websites work just fine now - the issue is Amazon having an economy of scale and business model whereby they almost all other e-commerce sites are an irrelevance.

manmal 9y ago

When it comes to e-Commerce, maybe we should rather listen to people who are actually managing a store. Tony Hsieh of Zappos has written a wonderful book about customer care, and it all boils down to getting in touch with the customer as MUCH as possible. Everytime a customer calls in, that’s a chance for you to create a positive experience for them, and they are more likely to become repeat customers. Without this, you become interchangeable. The very moment Amazon is superseded by another retailer with similar prices and return policy, I will change to them - I feel no loyalty towards them. That’s not the case with my local supermarket, where I know all the cashiers and there is this feeling of personal familiarity. So phone calls are not necessarily the problem - maybe digital sales automation is the problem.

Animats 9y ago
Tony Hsieh of Zappos has written a wonderful book about customer care, and it all boils down to getting in touch with the customer as MUCH as possible. He runs a shoe store. I never, ever, want a shoe store to "get in touch" with me.
- manmal 9y ago
  Customers get in touch with Zappos, not vice versa. But Zappos don't consider this a nuisance, but as a chance to wow the customer.

Animats 9y ago

Some commerce sites do have complicated problems. Ones where there are size and color options, but not all sizes and color combinations are available, have user interface problems. Car parts sites are getting good. They mostly now take the make and model of your car, and then give you a site that only shows items for that model. Industrial parts sites, especially for electronics, range from excellent to terrible. They have huge catalogs of very specific parts, and you need a specialized search engine to navigate them. Those things are not conversational; they're table driven.

perl4ever 9y ago
I am finding that for many things, there is someone who's occupied a niche with a great website and catalog, and looking for the same stuff on Amazon or eBay will turn up mediocrity, garbage, or nothing. But if you don't do some research on the specs of what you want to buy, you easily get funneled into Amazon. For instance, I wanted a cable for my printer. If I look on Amazon for XYZ printer cable, they will happily sell me one. It's very easy to find something when you do a simple minded search. But actually, it is a generic cable, and Amazon's listings have simply been spammed with every printer model name in creation. When I realized that, I went to a site that specializes in cables, and looked for a product based on the connector types. Doing that gave me real choices (such as the cable length, whether it has a ferrite core, etc.), detailed specs, and on top of that, much cheaper prices. The specific retailer or specialty doesn't matter - my point is that I am getting into (and advocate) the mindset that when I want something and it's not available locally, I start by thinking "I know someone is making a living by outdoing Amazon in a particular niche - how can I find their website?" Other random examples include chocolate and kitchen equipment. The effectiveness of Amazon as a baseline means, I think, that anyone with a thriving online business has to be something special these days.

mattlondon 9y ago

I'd argue that conversational interfaces for retail would only be good for standardised commodities - 6 medium hens eggs, a pack of 10 M6 screws, a ream of A4 paper etc - i.e. stuff that you don't care about the brand or specifics, you just need some eggs etc. Websites could do A LOT better by concentrating on putting better product info on their site: proper high res pictures from multiple angles (e.g. for products in boxes, show me every side of the box that I can zoom in and read the text on), descriptions that aren't just copy-paste marketing B.S., and proper measurements/sizes/specifications. That'd go a long way toward reducing confused shoppers having to call a help centre... Personally, if I have to talk to someone at a store (online or not), they've already started to annoy me. I just want to get my stuff then carry on with the more important things in life. Plus what is it about chatbots that is getting people so excited? Anyone that has an Alexa or Google home will tell you they are frustrating and irritating to use and a long way away from doing anything useful apart from trivial stuff like setting kitchen timers or stilted and excruciatingly awkward question-answer settings.

z3t4 9y ago

Yeh, well organised (library like) online stores suck. I rather buy my stuff by communicating with a sales person via SMS messages ...

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

pedalpete 9y ago

Off topic, but does the $500B total global advertising spend sound wrong to anybody else? I'm seeing reports of that number, but that seems incredibly low to me. Google made $95B in advertising revenue in 2017, can they really be almost 1/5th of the entire global advertising spend?

pif 9y ago

1 - HTML was meant for static content and e-commerce never was about static content. Wow, who could have thought about this? 2 - Humans like human conversation. Oh, the biggest surprise! Jeez, I learnt two things today!

dwheeler 9y ago

This is a nonsense ad for someone's services. I don't want websites to work totally differently from each other, nor does anyone else. Instead, I want to be able to find the information that I want, or be able to quickly acquire the services I want. There's a false premise about brick-and-mortar stores here too. Brick-and-mortar stores aren't radically different from each other either,; I expect doors to look like doors, windows to look like windows, and when I look for the bathroom I should be able to figure out how to use it. The notion that every website has to look radically different from each other is nonsense from people who are too excited about making new designs instead of wanting to help other people. Let's let's have fewer fads and more thinking about people, please.

FussyZeus 9y ago
The author I'm pretty sure never even mentioned trust, which is a big reason I stick to Amazon. You never know who on earth or what hackneyed system is on the other end of a credit card form. I like the fact that Amazon lets me order with my voice, and I like the fact that Amazon lets me order from any number of millions of merchants without fear of my credit card getting stolen (or at least, less fear than usual). The few times I checkout at other random websites I always use PayPal to avoid giving away valuable info.

kyledrake 9y ago

> I am going to make a bold prediction: In 2018, we will see the first major brand shut down its website. If that was a bet, I would put $50,000 down on it not happening.

vikingcaffiene 9y ago

I call BS. The authors predictions are based upon the assertion that people would rather make a phone call than use a website. I acknowledge that maybe I am in a bubble and don't understand the average user but, really?? It seems pretty commonplace for people in my generation (xennial) and those after mine to go out of their way to _avoid_ the phone. I will _always_ use an online communication method if I can. If the argument was that some new tech was coming to blow websites out of the water I could at least try to give it the benefit of the doubt. That's not the premise here and, much like email, many have tried to replace websites. All fail.

rossdavidh 9y ago
I am 50 years old, and I also will only resort to phone call as a last resort, when just going to a different website instead is not an option, so I think your point applies not only to youngsters.
- vikingcaffiene 9y ago
  I was thinking that maybe the author was coming from a place that was out of touch because of coming from a different time but I didn't mean to generalize an entire age group with that. I apologize if that's the way it came off. The bigger point here is that phone calls suck and we all agree. :-)

astura 9y ago

So the hypothesis is that every website looks the same thanks to Google yet, at the same time, nobody can figure out how to use these identical websites so everyone gets on the phone to do business. That's not matched my personal experience, to say the least