Project: Nonfiction Technology Book

Introduction

The Threat

My eleven-year-old daughter recently started her first business. She sells a custom homemade toy called slime, a viscous colorful substance that’s popular with kids. Her primary motivation is to help her favorite nonprofit—The Gorilla Foundation—through donations. A secondary goal is to earn $20K in five years through entrepreneurial efforts in preparation for college. It’s a good start for a young entrepreneur with charitable intentions, and I helped her with the business registration and built her a basic website to sell her product online.

The result was Sunstreak Slimes, a US-based company in Oregon.

She formally launched her products at a holiday bazaar event at her school. To our surprise and pleasure, hers was the most popular of all vendor spots at the market. She was even asked to do a birthday party event, which was totally unexpected.

Success at the market validated her business model and demand for her products, and made her enthusiastic about taking it online. I managed to place one of her products—Avalanche Slime—on the first page of Google’s search results, gave her a crash course on what it takes to succeed online, and left it to her to take it from there. It was an opportunity for her to experience first-hand the real-world challenges of running a business.

Days, weeks, and months passed, but her website didn’t get updated regularly, her ranking for Avalanche Slime slipped, and her website was as good as nonexistent. “I love making slime, but not writing about it,” she said.

For a young entrepreneur like my daughter, schoolwork consumes most waking hours. Every little break is a tug of war between family time and personal time, with no time to spare for “boring” content updates on a website that already has enough content to guide the website visitor in making a purchase.

My daughter’s five-year goal is a real possibility if she sells exclusively at local markets. Farmers’ markets, downtown markets, and local markets in general have been steadily growing in number because they embrace the time-tested values of localism in a true community sense. There’s a sense of belonging in such markets, with interactive conversations and high levels of confidence in buying and selling.

Selling at local markets, however, would take up all her time, with not much time left for school, and she would surely miss out on a balanced childhood in the process. That’s not acceptable.

In the Internet age, her website is the online representation of her as a vendor, and the Internet is the online representation of the local market she seeks to target. The problem is that the local market is not clearly defined online: de facto online search is global, and to target the local market one must compete globally online.

The practice of SEO, or search engine optimization—the online process through which vendors connect potential buyers to their products—is a moving target that has become a prerequisite for every business wanting to succeed online. SEO is an expensive overhead that’s not practical or effective for the vast majority of small businesses, which consequently turn to paid services and advertisements that generally end up draining further resources and adding to the struggles.

The threat is evident not just from search engines, but also from leading marketplaces like Amazon. Half of all online retail shoppers today skip traditional search engines altogether and go directly to Amazon. This alone reduces the SEO potential for retailers by more than half. Sellers on Amazon’s platform are essentially helping grow Amazon’s own brand in exchange for a new sales channel that offers no promises.

The threat from Amazon is not as significant to non-retailers as it is for retailers; however, Amazon has started expanding into local markets, and soon the threat will be to independent service providers, restaurants, bakeries, farms, and just about every business industry.

My daughter tried opening a seller account with Amazon, but the process overhead dictated by Amazon to list her few products was much more significant than she could manage.

Amazon is clearly not a solution. It’s part of the problem.

The threat is evident not just from search engines, but also from leading marketplaces like Amazon.

The Small Business Dilemma

My daughter isn’t alone.

Online technology, trends, and innovation have evolved in favor of globalism, while neglecting localism. In the current online landscape, small businesses are left with no choice online, but to scramble and embrace the overhead of competing in an unfavorable global landscape, irrespective of their desire and ability to serve their local customers.

“Survival of the fittest” is a fair game, but only if the playing field is level. Unfortunately, the biggest dilemma for small businesses is that the online playing field is not level, and current trends are increasingly favoring the biggest online players. In an online landscape where even Sears, Toys R Us, Macys and other traditional large companies are losing relevance, what chance do independent small and local businesses have?

In the present situation where the terms dictated by Google and Amazon are accepted as the norm, change will require challenging the status quo.

“Survival of the fittest” is a fair game, but only if the playing field is level.

As I studied the challenges and threats faced by small businesses across various industries, it became obvious that the online technology and trends are drifting further and further away from the ideal solution. In the quest to help businesses transcend traditional local boundaries, the importance of local commerce has been neglected. In the quest to be recognized as the best website or e-commerce platform, aesthetic appeal is being prioritized over sales and efficiency needs. In the quest to develop the biggest and greatest marketplace, the essence of independent business brand is being sacrificed. In the quest to serve the largest number of independent businesses, the community strengths are being sacrificed. Website and e-commerce platform providers are failing to empower small and local businesses to harness their unique independent and community strengths online.

There seems to be high interest in local commerce, but by and large it hasn’t gravitated and translated to the Internet. I decided to find out why.

The Buy-Local Dilemma

There are thousands of business communities across the United States and Canada focused on promoting and facilitating businesses selling and purchasing goods and services locally. Whether the goal is to promote and enhance the local economy, to provide ecological benefits, to promote their local businesses, or to bring jobs to a community, there’s a great deal of interest in the “buy local” concept and in making it work for both urban and rural communities across the country.

I spent a significant amount of time going to conferences and talking with various groups and individuals, and it became evident that while buying local is a laudable concept, putting it into practice is where it falls apart. I encountered people everywhere who believed passionately in the local movement, but no one was answering the critical question: How do we make it easy to buy local?

There must be an intersection between local establishments and online retail opportunities; every business must have a significant online presence in order to thrive. Making it easy to buy locally means making it easy to access local goods and services, not just in person, but also via the Internet. Almost everyone shops online, and if local businesses aren’t readily available online they’re going to lose out to national retailers that are generally just one convenient click away. The “buy local” concept is there; it’s the tools to do it online that are lacking.

Local Marketplaces Online

Amazon may be understood as a community: a community of sellers combined with a community of purchasers. The solution to integrating the buy-local concept with the ease and reach of an online retail marketplace, therefore, is to create a community to sustain it.

The goal is a thriving online marketplace addressing the buying and selling needs of a local community without additional overhead for businesses. The solution must do what Google and Amazon do  for consumers. It must also give equally importance to businesses, and enable new conveniences and efficiencies such as:

• Not dictate any data duplication or maintenance overhead

• Accommodate all business industries and not just retailers

• Automate local orders, appointments, and logistics for each business

• Operate as an automatic and real-time extension of independent websites

This new breed of online marketplace will give shoppers additional convenience, not less; additional savings, not fewer; and additional reasons to shop local first.

The first step to the solution is to make advanced website and e-commerce technology readily available.

The second step is to bring independent websites together into community-centric search and shopping marketplaces.

The third step is to provide new conveniences for buyers to search and transact with sellers in these online marketplace.

Google’s search engine exercises powerful global reach. It provides an option for local search, but it also constitutes an extra step many consumers are either unaware or unwilling to take. Local businesses are in essence competing with brands from all over the world—and local communities are losing those sales.

Imagine if we had the equivalent of the Google search engine for different communities —for example, a Google that is just for the city of Portland, or one that exclusively features independent bakeries across the state of Oregon. A localized search engine would draw the search in and restrict it to a community.

A localized search engine would draw the search in and restrict it to a community.

The model for this kind of search and community presence already exists in the physical world. Shoppers passing through a local farmers’ market are exposed to every vendor’s table or booth. The vendor doesn’t need to make any extra effort to be found by potential customers. Consumers who frequent the farmers’ market are a self-selected group of people who are interested in purchasing vendors’ goods. Every consumer won’t make a purchase from every vendor at the market, but every consumer will see every table or booth, and each vendor will have an equal opportunity at making a sale.

A local online marketplace must function in a similar manner: a self-selected group of consumers simply search for what they want among local vendors easily visible and accessible to those consumers.

Until very recently, ecommerce innovation has generally ignored the local aspect of online buying and selling. Instead, it has focused on non-local aspects of buying and selling.

The more I looked into the alternative of local online marketplaces, the more I became convinced that this intersection of local purchasing and technology is the best way for small businesses to increase online relevance, compete more effectively with their biggest competitors, and effectively counter the current online threat.

My Background

I’ve been looking at the question of usability for a long time, so this new idea fit in with my background and skill set. I have a graduate degree in environmental engineering and another in computer science. I started my career as a software developer building new capability for FedEx’s website, before moving to Intel where I’ve been for the past fourteen years, leading various technology and IT efficiency initiatives.

Long before my daughter started her business, my wife and I began talking about the challenges of single moms running part-time businesses from home. I gradually realized there was no online option to accommodate non-traditional businesses run by individual owners with only limited time to devote to running a business.

That was when I got intensely involved in the buy-local movement and started attending and sponsoring related conferences and networking with small businesses from all over the US. As I did, my knowledge of the scope of the problem grew. Chambers of commerce, I observed, were losing members and weren’t able to replace them, and businesses that should have been thriving were foundering.

I’m a certified business mentor and the workshop committee chair at my local chapter of SCORE (resource partner of the US government agency – Small Business Administration). I spend a good part of my time volunteering at SCORE and chambers of commerce, as the in-house expert in online sales and marketing. Over the course of the past several years I’ve gained a unique perspective into the threats and challenges faced by small businesses, and I’ve counseled scores of startups and businesses to help each navigate the online technology and noise. I also teach several workshops on this topic.

The need for this kind of information and expertise is clear. What I’m teaching is how to use currently available tools to enable small businesses to compete; but it’s not a permanent, long-term solution. It’s helpful, but it’s not the answer.

My Solution

I wrote this book to offer unique ideas and a viable solution to all the problems encountered by small businesses attempting to survive—and even flourish—in the online ecosystem. I know they face a growing inability to compete on search engines, or against their big competition, and I want to offer a prescription that will improve their futures.

I’ll start by helping you understand exactly what challenges small businesses are facing and what trends are working against them in the online ecosystem.

I’ll introduce you to a platform that adapts to your unique needs to help you enhance your website potential, and simultaneously.benefit from any number of online marketplaces that solve small and local companies’ challenges around trying to obtain a decent market share for both goods and services.

That marketplace is called SharedMall, and it does what Wordpress, Shopify, Amazon, Google, and all other platforms cannot: it provides access, convenience, and a level playing field for all businesses, in ways never before possible.

As of this writing, SharedMall is in place, helping businesses across a diverse range of industries to independently and uniquely overcome their current hurdles and challenges.

The book introduces a specific consumer cycle. Understanding how to identify and exploit this cycle will enable small and local businesses to improve the ways they are found, assessed, chosen, and transacted with online.

Finally, we’ll move into a vision underlining the importance of collective power and how it will enable small businesses to thrive and grow online by harnessing their collective power of communities Intel founder Andy Grove has said that only the paranoid survive, but it’s not paranoid to understand that the threat from Google’s SEO, Amazon’s dominance, and technology trends in general, is real and potentially fatal for small business owners and entrepreneurs, and must be addressed with a sense of urgency. Let’s look at what is at stake and what we must do to thrive now—and into the future.