I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few months writing content for our new site and thinking about how best to describe what we do at SysIQ.  So, I wanted to use this first blog entry to reflect on why we do what we do, and why I believe ecommerce and commerce in general transcends the bottom line and its impact on those of us who stand to gain personally.  I think it is also important to put a kind of economic “time-stamp” on my commentary as well, since my reflection on this topic will inevitably be a product of the unique economic circumstances of the moment.

I’m writing SysIQ’s first blog entry at the end of February, 2009 (though it will not be posted until our site goes live sometime later in the year).  We’ve had a new president in the United States for just a few weeks, and in recent months we’ve seen job losses of over half a million per month, the financial collapse of numerous banks, manufacturers, and retailers, thousands of foreclosures, and sharp declines in consumer spending.  My snap-shot of the current economic havoc hardly does it justice, but amidst all of this chaos and contraction, online spending continued to grow in the fourth quarter of 2008.  Granted, growth was down to 1% year-over-year, from a high of 15% in the spring, but in a climate where fewer dollars are being spent overall, it’s a compelling statistic.  What it means is that the gains in terms of the percentage of total retail dollars spent are far more significant than the 1% year-over-year growth would indicate.

Although my instincts are to continue drilling down on the numbers, I’ll save that analysis for another entry.  At the moment I’d like to pull back and take this particular trend as an opportunity put ecommerce into a broader social and historical context.

Commerce and trade have too often been dismissed as lesser endeavors than other, supposedly nobler, pursuits such as science, philosophy, art or even politics.  However, when exploring the breadth of history, trade has been at the heart of many of the greatest leaps forward in human civilization.  I won’t recount all of them here, but will instead simply describe an example that I believe to be an apt parallel to current changes the recent communications revolution has brought about.  In 1454 Johannes Gutenberg invented the first movable type printing press.  The result of his creation was that something that was prohibitively expensive to all but the richest elites, in this case books and printed material, became widely available.  It allowed for an exchange of ideas that had previously been impossible and significantly contributed to the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods that followed, as well as growing literacy rates in the time since.  However the exchange of ideas happened because entrepreneurial traders recognized the opportunity that the printing press created and capitalized on it.  In the end it was trade that reshaped human civilization through the spread of the printed word.

Similar examples of trade as a catalyst for the reorganization of human activity are scattered across history; from the traders who followed the crusades, to Marco Polo, to the Columbian exchange; commercial activity has led to significant advances, not only in our quality of life, but in the way we behave as populations and think about the world around us. 

Given this fact, it strikes me that the ability to successfully introduce new products to new markets is something of an art, at least as much of an art as it is a science. It is an art that has now arrived at a point in history where ecommerce technology allows us to bring any product to virtually any market on the planet. 

The trouble is that the vast number of options that are the result of these new commercial capabilities can be overwhelming for consumers.  The World Wide Web has become an infinite menu of possible choices that can often confound our ability to choose only one.  The challenge that e-retailers are faced with in light of this dilemma is how to differentiate their companies from the near infinite number of other merchants vying for consumer dollars.  Addressing this challenge will be the focus of this blog going forward, and it is my hope that in doing so we will be able to contribute not only towards the advancement of commercial enterprise, but perhaps play a small roll in the advancement of our civilization.