Analyst Safa Rashtchy at Piper Jaffray thinks we’re in the midst of E-commerce 3.0, where Google stands ready to become the next great online commercial power.
Few doubt Google’s search supremacy, and its advertising driven profitability has brought in billions in revenue. That has validated Google’s bet on contextual ads. Next, Google may seek to profit from the sales process between people as it revs up its classifieds service.
Internet Retailer cited Rashtchy, who sees a formidable Google competing with the existing players in person to person sales: “Google will be a Craigslist on steroids-a very potent and dangerous challenge to where eBay wants to go.”
As far as e-commerce 3.0, what happened to the first two? Rashtchy explained in the article:
E-commerce 1.0 was defined by early efforts by dot-coms at excessive branding and advertising, but without a sustainable platform or customer base, Rashtchy says. E-commerce 2.0 debuted with the advent of Internet search, which provided the necessary connection between e-retailers and large volumes of consumers, and 3.0 will take that to a local level.
The analyst sees search as Google’s advantage over Craigslist, in which eBay is a minority stakeholder. “Craigslist has the limitations that it cannot scale massively as it lacks robust search functionality,” Rashtchy said. “Google, on the other hand, can create a massive and still highly efficient listing service as it has already done with web search.”
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
