It may seem like the world of e-commerce is an increasingly mature space but it is still surprisingly segmented.

Almost every marketplace, from Amazon to EBay, has its own listings policies and proprietary formats making the life of an independent online retailer a complicated one.

Stepping into the breach are sites like SellerExpress which provide centralised platforms from which online retailers can manage their listings, and stock levels, across numerous marketplaces – in this instance Play.com and the various Amazon marketplaces.

A single dashboard allows for bulk uploads across multiple sites and rapid data entry based on product barcode or ISBN numbers. The site also allows retailers to ‘auto reprice’ ensuring that they maintain the highest possible margins while still shifting their stock.

It’s probably not the sexiest industry to play in but where there’s customer pain, there’s potential profits.

Site: www.sellerexpress.com

If you’ve ever thought that sites like eBay, Craigslist or Etsy felt a little anonymous then Krrb may well be for you.

Krrb follows the same basic premise but organises its online community around physical cities and neighbourhoods, allowing you to trade, sell, swap or give away stuff locally – and most importantly – in person. The site isn’t tecnically an ecommerce site in that Krrb simply brings the parties together, with transactions happening offline.

From the site:

Krrb is a safe place to buy, sell, trade or give to your neighbors — locally and in-person. Krrb puts you at the center of your stomping grounds and displays all that you and your neighbors have to offer.

Not only does this help set the site apart but it also creates a real sense of community and could even serve to help people get to know their neighbours better. Think garage sale rather than global marketplace.

It also goes to show that even in well-established online business models there’s room for real innovation.

Site: www.krrb.com Via: Swissmiss

Pic: BruceTurner

We’ve written here before about how smart retailers can move beyond price-driven retail and become community hubs. In doing so they market themselves, diversify their revenue streams, improve market share, keep their fingers on the pulse and have a helluva lot of fun in the process.

Based in Austin TX, Mellow Johnny’s Bike Shop is Lance Armstrong’s spot. Calling it a bike shop doesn’t really cover it though.

More than a retail box, Lance and his friends aim to make the shop a hub of cycling life, commuting, social activity, fitness, and a temple of two-wheeled living….To serve the bike community is our job, but to convert people to a bike life is our mission.

In practice that means a retail store, a coffee shop, storage lockers for biking commuters, a regular schedule of events and classes on everything from maintenance to traffic skills, a “state of the art training and testing facility led by 6-Time Tour de France rider Kevin Livingston” and even something of an art gallery downstairs, housing photographic exhibitions.

This is retail as shopping destination, service provider, educational organisation, community hub and general fun place to hang out. It’s a movement.

How could you create this same kind of effect in your industry and scaled to your local market?

Site: mellowjohnnys.com

The always excellent PSFK have released their Future of Retail report which you can view above or here. Go get inspired.

In another example of people turning just about anything into a business opportunity, online retailers are selling jars of volcanic ash from Eyjafjallajökull [ay-ah-fjad-la-jo-kul], the Icelandic volcano which disrupted over 100,000 flights in Europe.

Sites: www.nordicstore.net / www.nammi.is

It may sound a little odd, but most retailers that sell both online and off, maintain separate stock control systems and often have to resort to updating their online stock levels manually.

Belfast-based startup AirPOS aims to fix that.

AirPOS is stock control and ePOS software that connects bricks and mortar and online sales channels, allowing retailers “to sell from a single stock across unlimited points of sale”. The software integrates with most existing POS hardware and comes with a genuinely disruptive price tag at around 10% of existing POS software.

Delivery in the cloud also allows AirPOS to be used anywhere an internet connection is available (suggesting a whole host of mobile uses), unique scalability, real-time stock updates and immediate software upgrades (which are free for life).

“With AirPOS we intend to accelerate the technology revolution in sale systems – particularly mobile commerce – and to break and disrupt traditional business models,” …  “We’re taking our leads from the truly innovative companies of the web like PayPal and Salesforce.com, thinking about viral coefficients, zero-touch distribution and freemium models.”

As you’d probably guess, AirPOS has already attracted private investment and is being looked at with interest by giants like PayPal and Adobe (the whole thing is built on Adobe Air). As early investor (and former VP and SVP at AOL, Inc. and Cisco Systems) David Kirk put it: “It feels like being in on the ground floor of an eBay or Amazon.”

Site: www.airpos.co.uk

More at SyncNI

Smart retailers have always known to go where the customers are. Online, that ‘where’ is Facebook.

ShopFans is an e-commerce application that allows retailers to set up shop inside the social networking site, with all transactions taking place directly in Facebook.

A few neat tools also leverage the social element to allow users to share ‘likes’, rate products, register for private sales and offers, create wishlists and gift registries and otherwise pass along the brand’s message and products.

And according to their CEO, it’s the knitting of slick, secure e-commerce together with the social elements that separates ShopFans from other ‘social commerce’ efforts.

“In order for true social shopping to exist, brands need access to a holistic solution which ties directly into all of the Facebook social hooks, allows users to shop without ever leaving Facebook, and provides a secure ecommerce experience.”

All pretty compelling stuff for just about any retailer.

The question is whether these kinds of applications will lead to a raft of miniprenuers opening up Facebook retail stores in the same way as they flocked to sell on eBay and Amazon.

I vote ‘yes’.

Link: StyleQ’s ShopFans Stroefront Via: TechCrunch

Following on from yesterday’s art theme, Culture Label takes the idea of ‘collate and curate’ a step further: selling an ‘edit of products currently available from over 70 leading museum shops, galleries, artists and culture institutions from around the world’.

But retail is only part of what they do.

Culture Label are strong proponents of what they call ‘cultural entrepreneurship‘, and work with cultural organisations – museums in particular – to help them adopt new technologies and realise new revenue streams.

“We’re built on the belief that devising a healthy strategy to balance the cultural and the commercial makes the difference between a strained marriage of convenience and a mutual love-in with remarkable babies.”

Under the banner of the ‘digital museum’, they offer e-publishing solutions, paperless ticketing, e-commerce and the Artful mobile application which allows museums to deliver their content as a paid for app, with no development costs.

All of which can help add to a museum’s bottom line and/or bring their cultural assets to a wider audience – balancing the cultural and commercial.

As Culture Label shows, when you dive deep into the needs of a single industry (or even a single customer type), it’s possible to create a suite of products and services that are truly complementary.

But to it effectively requires a willingness to live and breathe that particular space. As they are keen to point out: “Talking about cultural entrepreneurship is one thing. Living by it is another story altogether.”

Site: www.culturelabel.com