We English, a nation of (RSS) shopkeepers
We English are a nation of shopkeepers. Napoleon Bonaparte said so.
As just such a shopkeeper, I have to say that I do love my work. I get up early every morning to check how sales went overnight. How many customers came in? What did they buy? Did they ask for anything that I haven't got in stock? I then check the money 'take' to confirm what's selling well and what's not. My shop, by the way, is a 'open all hours' Internet enterprise.
My next joys are to replenish the shelves of my shop with fresh products and remove any old stock. This isn't a manual labour of love though. It's just a matter of visiting several wholesalers on the 'net (the affiliate network sites) and ordering stock. These sites offer shopkeepers like me a growing number of RSS product feeds.
I simply select the merchants I want to do business with and the products I want to stock. The degree of product selection available to me depends on the way the RSS feeds have been set-up. Sometimes, I must take every product a merchant offers me (or none at all); often I can take a group of products from various merchants; usually, I can opt for a specific product with high value to my customers.
Having made my selections (of merchant and product), I download the RSS feeds. This is an elegant process, whereby the software checks to see if I already have the ordered products in stock at the desired levels, fills my shelves if I haven't, and removes any stock that's past its 'sell-by' date. There are no delivery drivers to monitor; no pallet trucks to push; no returns documentation to fill in. What's more, my merchants do most of the merchandising for me: offering me up-to-date photographs, product descriptions, prices and so on, as part of their feeds.
Within an hour, I've re-stocked my shop with fresh, desirable produce. Of course, that's not the end of my joy. Oh no, the rest of my day is spent in gleeful bookkeeping, marketing and so on; the kind of pleasures undertaken elsewhere in retail management. Thankfully, my wholesalers do much of the data management for me, which makes bookkeeping easier. The suppliers meanwhile send me special offers by email, which is akin to entertaining sales reps. in real world shopping, I suppose.
I've just painted a very rosy picture of the modern English shopkeeper. It sounds like an idyllic way to earn a living. Yet, being an English shopkeeper largely reliant on RSS feeds does have its frustrations.
First, too few of the big merchants have understood the power of marketing via RSS feed and affiliation. These sluggish retail giants, many with a long-standing presence on English high streets, are missed by those of us with neighbourhood corner shops. We want to pass business their way, for a small commission. So, take note please big merchants, the costs of setting-up and maintaining RSS feeds, and paying us small commissions, are far outweighed by the value of increased sales.
It seems that some of the 'giants' have been caught off-guard by the cost-effectiveness of this new technology and approach to marketing in combination. It's simply a matter of them re-writing their product lists in XML and offering the coded feeds to affiliate networks. When they do so, I suggest humbly that they seek out networks offering small shopkeepers like me an unlimited number of feeds at no cost, and that they avoid studiously any 'exclusive' deals.
Some merchants are quicker to exploit new technologies than others; that's the way markets work. The most agile survive: the least agile suffer. This creates an opportunity for small and medium sized merchants who are inherently more agile than larger competitors. We English shopkeepers, need them to master RSS technology and affiliation quickly, to plug the gaps in the market left by big merchants.
Recently, for example, I've been hunting English merchants who can offer me affiliated RSS feeds for used and new cars. I have also been hunting merchants capable of offering me regularly updated RSS feeds for package holidays, jobs and real estate. Cars, holidays, jobs and houses are just the sort of products that would sell well in my shop, yet there are big gaps in the market there right now.
To conclude, Napoleon was right: we English are a nation of shopkeepers. Many, like me, love our work. To continue the tradition, what this particular English shopkeeper needs is two things. Additional, big merchants offering affiliated RSS feeds with broad appeal and smaller merchants offering narrower, deeper feeds that cater for niche interests.
Steve Hawker is a partner at http://www.ehawker.co.uk E-mail him at: info at ehawker.co.uk © Steve Hawker 2005. All rights reserved. This article must be reproduced in its entirity.