Sometimes I think that writing a blog has become a bit old fashioned. I should probably be making videos. But the reality is that I like writing. Getting up in the morning, reading, having a coffee, and writing my thoughts down is a ritual that I really enjoy. Making videos is also a bigger time commitment, and I would rather focus my energy elsewhere.

But there's no question that user-generated videos have and will continue to change ecommerce and many other aspects of society. This recent blog post by Connie Chan and Avery Segal called, "Ecommerce as video's killer app," is a perfect example of that. In it, they talk about a handful of Chinese companies that are pioneering "shoppable videos."

What these platforms are doing is allowing consumers to buy things natively within their app and through a "video-centric checkout flow." In other words: watch a story being told (from an individual, as opposed to a company); become interested in a particular product or service; and then immediately purchase it with only a few taps.

Another use case, which I think many of you will find interesting, is the creation of "crowdsourced video city guides." Instead of checking for hotel reviews on TripAdvisor, simply find someone who has already vlogged a stay and book it that way. The individual who uploaded the video will then earn a commission.

This behavior already exists. Discovery and buying decisions -- for many products and services -- have moved to social platforms. Just today a friend reached out asking me about a bar that she saw on my Instagram stories a few weeks. She's planning to go next week. Now where's my commission?

Shoppable videos are a natural extension. They may also lower the barriers to participation. And so maybe I will end up making videos, after all.

Benedict Evan's most recent blog post, called "Amazon as experiment," draws some interesting parallels between what Amazon is doing today (and experimenting with) and the beginning of mass retail, namely the invention of the department store. He also talks about some of the shortcomings of Amazon's model, which isn't at all focused on (or good at) things such as "pleasure" and product discovery. Here are a couple of excerpts:

On the other hand, it’s interesting that Amazon seems to be doing as much experimentation as possible around the logistics model—from stores to drones to warehouse robots of every kind—but much less around the buying experience, other than small-scale tests of the Four-Star stores. After all, historically, department stores were about pleasure as much as they were about convenience or price. They changed what it meant to "go shopping" and helped turn retail into a leisure activity.

This has always been the gap in the Amazon model. It’s ever more efficient at finding what you already know you want and shipping it to you, but bad at suggesting things you don’t already know about, and terrible whenever a product needs something specific—just try finding children’s shoes by size.

This is probably inherent in the model. For Amazon to scale indefinitely to unlimited kinds of products, it needs to have more or less the same commodity logistics model for all of them. That’s the line it’s never been willing to cross. Amazon doesn’t do "unscalable." And yet, while we now know there is nothing that people won’t happily buy online, not everything will fit that commodity model. So maybe that’s the real test of Amazon’s pride: can it work out how to let us shop, rather than just buy?

This is an excellent talk by NYU professor Scott Galloway about Amazon, online grocery, and many other aspects of the retail landscape. The bits about Amazon’s scale and reach are fascinating. There is about 30 minutes of him speaking quickly and then another 15 minutes of Q&A. If you can’t see it below, click here.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HyiY_m_YxI&w=560&h=315]