Dear visitor,

thank you for visiting my blog.

What drives me?

My drive to write this blog is to contribute to a more human and more interactive E-commerce. My vision is to realize a mixture of retail and ecommerce experience . I am inspired by Chet Holmes “The ultimate sales machine”. This best seller clearly describes the value of a customer oriented approach.

Marketing data that shows that social media marketing is far from effective and conversion ratios in Ecommerce are around 2 %, but many are a lot less. From a customer perspective a conversion ratio of 2 % means that customers on average need 50 shop visits to decide on a purchase.
Who would do that willingly, if the shopping experience was optimized?

I believe Ecommerce can create a much better shopping experience. And I believe that a social medium that is meaningful to customers adds value in the purchasing process. That value will be rewarded with customer loyalty and reduced price pressure.

My key concepts are :

In action interaction

community and shopping are currently separated. Community is built on Social Media and review pages. Shopping is done on the website. My vision is that customers want an open interaction platform while shopping.

Small is beautiful

the current community approach aims to create large communities. A thousand participants is better than a hundred. This is more than most people feel comfortable with. Position yourself is a situation where a question is asked and you know the answer. When are you more likely to act and stand out to answer: in a room with 100 people or in one with 4 people? Real communication only happens when the scale is human.

Relevance is magic

Social media is about distributing messages to an audience. That is not identical to communication. Communication is mutual interaction between a sender and a receiver, including the feedback of the reverse stream of verbal or non-verbal feedback. In order to achieve communication the message should be of interest to the listener. Relevance is thus more important that distribution list.

How do I know what I know?

I have 20 years experience in designing IT solutions for trade and industry. I worked in B2C Ecommerce and B2B commerce, in small firms and multinationals.

My personal experience as customer is a source of inspiration as well. I got much positive feedback from people on the concepts I developed. That encouraged me to start blogging about them so more people will learn how to view social media and community commerce differently. My continuous stream of ideas led me to bundle them into one total concept which resulted in my book ‘Forget reach, Start stelling. – What e-commerce should learn from retail.’

I hope you will enjoy my blog posts. Please share your thoughts with me and grant me your feedback.

I would be grateful when you share my thoughts with others.

Ger van den Buijs