A comment on E-Commerce and community
Fred Wilson has an interesting post this morning on active vs. non-active users and specifically turns the conversation towards e-commerce sites. He suggests that it is possible for e-commerce sites to build non-transaction focused communities, and sites Amazon and Etsy as successful examples. I disagreed, and left the following comment:
I have the unique experience of both working within Amazon’s community group and running Product Management at Etsy…
Frankly, I don’t think Amazon does a very good job at all of keeping non-transacting users on the site. First, I would suggest that people writing reviews or Listmanias are not necessarily active users. Most of the time, just like with Wikipedia editors, people write one review and disappear. So that is not community building. A small percentage of people regularly participate in discussion boards, but it’s not a number that moves any needles.
Etsy has an obsessed but modestly sized group of people who participate on the forums. Generally, these are sellers, not buyers, and I don’t remember exact numbers but probably are around 5-10% of the total user base. Yes, many people do regularly come back to the site and add items to their favorites, but that’s a form of window shopping like Amazon’s Add to Wishlist. I don’t think you can call that a community either. Etsy’s other community feature – virtual lab chats – include up to 100s of participants, but for a site with millions of registered accounts, that’s not meaningful either. I don’t remember how many people read the Etsy blog, so I can’t comment there.
So I don’t think e-commerce has figured out community at all. Etsy has repeat traffic because the community that has grown up around design blogs – Design Milk, Daily Candy, etc – regularly blog about items discovered on Etsy, constantly sending traffic over to Etsy… because of the items listed for sale, not any particular non-transactional feature.
To be successful, I think Etsy should build a Tumblr-like community platform where members can publish the items they’ve discovered and marked as favorite, read blog posts by those members about their crafting experiences, and publish photos of them wearing / using / creating the items found on the site. Then, allow users to “follow” each other, reblogging the best content. Every semi-regular Etsy user can tell you finding that diamond in the rough is a frustrating experience on Etsy (the provided search tools are very rudimentary), and providing a social platform for passing these links around can be extremely powerful. As a bonus, all of this user-generated content provides great SEO for Etsy.
sara girlscantell said,
July 17, 2009 @ 6:40 am
well, to comment on your comment…
i largely agree with your observations on etsy and amazon. the only thing i’d add is that etsy *does* have the etsy teams (and, yes, i’m biased, since teams were my baby).
i truly believe that, while they are comprised almost 100% of sellers, they are indeed little communities. i guess i should point out that my definition of community might be a group of people sharing information and interacting to accomplish goals that mutually benefit all involved. for example, just as my local neighborhood association is a community, active etsy teams that set goals and communicate well to accomplish them are little communities.
and some of the day to day things teams accomplish are really amazing – providing support or a sounding board for one another, sharing tips, tricks and ideas on products, or general promotion of their businesses as a group and so much more.
while they are primarily sellers that form the teams, sellers can sell lots of places these days, and the teams are a sticky quality of the site (and an overlooked one at that).
Kethy Wright said,
July 22, 2009 @ 4:33 am
HI
Nice Comment,
I Really like it.
DarthPatT said,
October 8, 2009 @ 5:55 pm
Ebay too…