Jordy Blog

Walled Gardens and Open Source

I posted the other day about how universal wishlists are one of the ways the walls of traditional marketing are coming down. In a broader sense, this trend is going on all over the place: the walls of the walled gardens are coming down as big companies realize that customers don’t like to be corralled. Even the quintessentially walled AOL is allowing users to access their Yahoo mail through AOL. They’re still a long way from not sucking, but they’re making steps.

Still remarkably walled: Apple. I understand that uniformity is a big part of their branding, but I predict some of the those walls will come down. Competition from open platforms (like Rockbox for the iPod and Android as an answer to the iPhone SDK) practically ensures it.

And the greatest enemy to walled gardens (at least in the software world): open source. It’s big enough now that even regular folks should start figuring out what it’s all about. Open source is the reason Firefox kicks IE’s butt in terms of useabilty.

Read Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar for an excellent treatise on the way open source is changing the software world.

Photo credit: historyanorak

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Universal Wishlists: A Lesson in Open Marketing

Universal Wishlist Review

I’m not a big shopper, especially when it comes to traditional brick-and-morter stores, but the internet marketer in me loves new features that make online shopping more pleasant. Such is Amazon’s new Universal Wishlist feature. (OK, it’s not that new, but it’s still awesome.)

I love Amazon’s Universal Wishlist because it allows me to save items from other online stores right to my Amazon wishlist. Being able to store all of the products I want in one place has made Amazon my de facto shopping site for filing away stuff that I want now, but can only afford to buy someday. It’s my new virtual den of covetousness.

Other similar services exist as well. TheThingsIWant also looks kind of cool, and it has basically the same core functionality.  I haven’t tried it, but they supposedly have a feature that allows you to syndicate your wishlist to your blog. Very cool, and surely they’re getting some affiliate commission from that. I’m not sure that I would ever use wishlist syndication, but I can definitely see it being an interesting component of a personal or family blog.

It occurred to me that Google Product Search must have some similar feature, and sure enough, they do. Google shopping list lets you save products you want and compare prices across tons of online stores. It also lets you save notes and publish products in either a public or private list. Very cool. The biggest feature that it’s missing (for me, anyway) is the ability to make your own wishlist submissions for items from smaller stores (like the Mises.org store) that don’t show up on Google’s radar. Too bad. Still, it’s great if you only buy from big retailers.

Anyway, if you’re online shopping experience has been bound to one retailer, I now pronounce it unbound.

Lessons in Open Marketing

But, you might be asking yourself: “Why would Amazon extend it’s functionality to to other sites? Isn’t that giving away some of its secret sauce, let alone revenue?”

Answers:

1. Amazon uses the Universal Wishlists to make the “long tail” even longer, meaning it allows for even more product to be saved on it’s site. This is not necessarily to their direct benefit (since they don’t get the direct sale) but it does help build a shopping community around their site, and that’s as good as gold.
2. I’m sure Amazon also gets a bit of a traffic boost from this. When else would I ever go from Mises.org directly to Amazon? Having a “Click to add” to my Amazon wishlist right in my browser makes Amazon one click away from any retailer on the net. Now that’s smart. (This is somewhat analogous to building a brick-and-morter store in the mall. Why build right next to your competition? Because you can both benefit from the increased traffic that being in the the place for shopping will bring. If it’s sybmiotic, it works for everyone.)
3. Another win for Amazon: data mining. Suddenly Amazon knows what products I’m “eyeing” from other sites, often their direct competition. That’s great data to have when for making pricing, merchandising, and marketing decisions. That kind of competitive data is priceless, especially to an online store that process and act on that data quickly. Interested in a lawnchair from so-and-so? well here are our lawnchairs. X customer added Y watch from Z store? Why don’t we sell Y watch? You get the picture.

Overall I think implementing the Universal Wishlist a great, although somewhat unintuitive, strategic move for Amazon. It’s gutsy to encourage and facilitate increasing sales for other retailers; but it also builds community, increases site traffic, and provides meaningful (and actionable) data for competive analysis. Plus it builds goodwill –or at least it did for me. I appreciate being able to use Amazon’s wishlist feature wherever I find good products. That’s just good marketing.