The
Department of Commerce’s Quarterly Retail E-Commerce Sales report
(http://dtn.fm/G4a7J), issued last month, shows, as expected, that online
commerce continues its relentless growth. E-commerce sales for the first three
months of 2016 registered an increase of about 15 percent over the comparable
period in 2015. E-commerce continues to bite into traditional sales. The first
quarter of 2016’s growth of 15 percent far exceeds the 2.2 percent rise in
total retail sales. Additionally, online sales in Q1 2016 were 3.7 percent
higher than those in Q4 2015. This is remarkable. The last quarter of the year
is always the peak period when many retailers ‘go in the black’, or become
profitable, while first quarter sales are historically the lowest.
However,
despite its phenomenal growth, e-commerce still comprises a minor share of the
overall retail market. E-commerce sales for Q1 2016, at $92.8 billion, were
just 7.8 percent of total retail sales for the period. Future development of
online commerce depends on the increased acceptability of transacting online
and the extent to which brick and mortar establishments migrate to the Web.
Many such establishments are building an online presence through websites and
social media channels, yet being found on the Web is the obverse to finding the
proverbial needle in a haystack. A search for ‘handbags’ returns over 72
million results, while one for ‘ties’ produces more than 279 million pages.
Being found through organic search on the internet is a major challenge for
small enterprises.
The
story is the same in China, where Moxian, Inc. (OTCQB: MOXC) operates at
present. With a population three times the size of the U.S., both the pitfalls
and opportunities are much larger.
Census
figures (http://dtn.fm/9PgmV) for the U.S. reported 1.1 million retailers of
all kinds in 2008, a figure that must be higher now since the 2008 measure
surely reflects the depressed economic conditions of the Great Recession. Taken
together with the ‘102,728 e-commerce retailers in the United States that are
generating at least $12,000 per year in revenue’, offered in an informative
Forbes piece (http://dtn.fm/8GWsn), it appears that just about 10 percent of
retail establishments have managed to successfully establish an online salient.
These numbers reveal opportunities that Moxian plans to exploit as an
intermediary. That’s because, as a 2014 article (http://dtn.fm/gMJ86) in Forbes
has prophesied, vertical marketplaces are coming into their own. Citing the
ascent of ‘large vertical services marketplaces like Uber, Airbnb, Upwork and
HomeAway/VRBO’, the author explains these successes by suggesting that the
‘secret sauce’, as he calls it, is focus.
“The
secret sauce is not the technology, although that plays an important supporting
role. It is the single-minded obsessive focus on solving one big universal
problem for the buyers, and removing that friction that existed in transacting
offline. When the solution is understood, built and solved at scale, this
‘secret sauce’ enables marketplaces to grow exponentially,” reads the article.
The idea here is that horizontal marketplaces, in trying to be all things to
all men, will be nothing to no one in the end.
There
is more to this idea than just hype. The Moxian+ online platform does what all
good intermediaries do; It matches buyers and sellers. It provides a support
infrastructure so customers can pay safely and engage with others, and it helps
merchants promote their goods and analyze buying patterns. The Moxian+ platform
reduces informational asymmetries and increases transparency of price and
quality. Overall, consumers spend less time searching and have a more
satisfying shopping experience.
Moxian,
Inc. engages in the business of providing social marketing and promotion
platforms designed to help merchants accelerate and advertise their business
growth through social media. These products and services enable merchants to
run targeted advertising campaigns and promotions, and aim to enhance the
interaction between users and merchant clients by using consumer behavior data
compiled from the Moxian database of user activities. The company has two
primary core products: Moxian+ User App and Moxian+ Business App.
For
more information, visit the company’s website at www.Moxian.com
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