- there are many items people buy on price and are willing to order online. Such items will gradually become unavailable in stores whether or not this idea is ever implemented.
- there are also many items that people want immediately, and are not well suited for online ordering. This convenience makes them well suited to these local search capabilities, and this characteristic may overcome a good part of the resistance to share data.
This distinction is crucial. It may not overcome the psychological resistance you mention, but it isn't obvious how serious that is or whether it can be overcome by system design. For example, you point out a key feature of this system which is the need for limited query capabilities and no downloading (cue debate on how possible that is).
But you miss the real problem with the idea. System integration difficulties will prevent the system from achieving critical mass and broad coverage. It will be unreasonably painful for stores to join the system for extremely mundane reasons like file formats and the difficulty of mapping proprietary taxonomies. Offline retailers just won't have data as ready to integrate as online.
Not impossible, but the sort of unrecognized under appreciated real challenge of the system.
> But you miss the real problem with the idea. System integration difficulties will prevent the system from achieving critical mass and broad coverage.
I don't think that would be impossible. Unlikely maybe, but if the Groupon approach was taken (huge sales teams) it could work.
The hardest part of this idea is not getting stores to use it[1], it's proving that the product has enough value to stores for them to put work into it. Look at Groupon, places are falling over themselves to get involved (or were) to their own detriment (see the stories of people selling $20k of product for $1k) and with the rise of the internet high street shops are having problems. A place in my hometown that had been around for 30 years shut down earlier in the year because their business was being taken by online alternatives; they would have jumped at the chance to take anything that would have improved the businesses prospects no matter the work involved. It's not the question of "should we have 100k profit this year of 101k?" it's "should we break even this year or shut down?"
If the product actually provided value to the stores (which I think it won't, it would harm them) then getting stores involved wouldn't be hard. Again, maybe it's England specific but a lot of high street stores here are losing business fast and I doubt any of them would be stupid enough to ignore an opportunity to increase their business, regardless of the work involved, I think that the OPs idea is the problem. Stores aren't big giant corporate machines with hundreds of different parts, if a system had a good sales team and a good product I don't believe it would be as hard as you state.
[1] Technically the hard part is getting stores to use it, yes, but that's a byproduct of showing there is enough value. If there is enough value I believe getting stores to switch to the system would not be as difficult as building a valuable product.
Not if they specialize in items that are not well suited to mail order. The urban corner grocery doesn't compete on price with the supermarket 10 blocks away. Locality is the foundation of their business.
I'm not saying that there are enough categories of items that are not well suited for mail order, and have a high degree of value based locality. But this is the central question for such a product.
Retailers whose businesses are protected by locality won't be as reluctant as you imagine. Note that these will be the only successful local retailers over time anyway.
You make a good point, not 100% of the brick and mortar stores would be actively hostile. That wasn't what I meant to imply although perhaps there are more stores, with a high degree of value based locality, than I was originally supposing.
These are also precisely the businesses that currently have the loosest idea of their actual inventory and would incur the most changes to move to the kind of inventory tracking necessary for this to work.
They are also frequently the categories of items that consumers would comparison shop the least. Few people care about going to a few corner groceries to get the right brand of milk. They all carry mostly the same group of products and anything were consumers care about choice (coke/pepsi) they already carry all the options for the same price as everyone else.
- there are many items people buy on price and are willing to order online. Such items will gradually become unavailable in stores whether or not this idea is ever implemented.
- there are also many items that people want immediately, and are not well suited for online ordering. This convenience makes them well suited to these local search capabilities, and this characteristic may overcome a good part of the resistance to share data.
This distinction is crucial. It may not overcome the psychological resistance you mention, but it isn't obvious how serious that is or whether it can be overcome by system design. For example, you point out a key feature of this system which is the need for limited query capabilities and no downloading (cue debate on how possible that is).
But you miss the real problem with the idea. System integration difficulties will prevent the system from achieving critical mass and broad coverage. It will be unreasonably painful for stores to join the system for extremely mundane reasons like file formats and the difficulty of mapping proprietary taxonomies. Offline retailers just won't have data as ready to integrate as online.
Not impossible, but the sort of unrecognized under appreciated real challenge of the system.