The Changing Face of eCommerce in a Marketplace Driven Economy

Greetings everybody, welcome to the Wednesday, February 10th, 2016 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook and I'm with WSI Internet Consulting where we work with businesses and organizations on helping them better understand and leverage the power of the internet as a strategic business tool. You can learn more about me and WSI online at www.poweredbywsi.com. With me this week is my good friend and Free Webinar Wednesday partner, Mr. Jeff Simpkins. Jeff, say hello to everybody out there in Free Webinar Wednesday world.

Greetings everybody. We're doing the express greeting today, so quickly, this is Jeff Simpkins. I'm with Community Bank Consulting, Inc. Learn more about me and my company online at www.communitybankconsulting.com. Eric?

Yes. Well, the express is because there are some issues going on with GoToWebinar. We certainly apologize to everybody that is maybe having to catch this on the recording. We do have a few people that were able to finagle their way in and join us live, so thank you to those of you that persisted and kept trying to get in. We will do our best, and hopefully the GoToMeeting gremlins won't come back and bite us in the butt. But with any luck, we're going to get a good recording of this, and I know I'm very excited to have Adam Broadway back with us and chatting. about the concept of a marketplace-driven economy and what that really means, because I know that that's a new term. It's been around for a while, but not a lot of people have really heard about it. So Adam is with us on the line, so say hello to everybody there, Adam.

G'day everybody, thanks for having me on, Jeff and Eric.

G'day. So there's that Australian in you coming out, I love it. So, so I'm going to go ahead and hopefully this will work. Let me see here. I don't see where you are in as a presenter yet, though. I think you might be having problems.

Well, yeah, I'm one of the people that cannot connect. Yes, I am unable to connect at the moment. The status from GoToMeeting says it's still unable to connect me. So I'm unfortunately not able to show my screen. So we can just talk at the topics, open up Q&A, and then I'd be happy to even revisit this another time when GoToMeeting is working properly.

Eric, if you will take just a moment and do the question-answer instructions.

Yeah, so before I forget, because I know we're abbreviated here, we do have Q&A. That were able to join live and are on the line with us. If you are interested in asking a question, feel free to use your chat functionality there at the control panel, and Jeff and I will keep an eye on those and make sure we ask them. Make sure— let me see. It looks like everybody's pretty much voice over IP. And as I mentioned earlier, the session is being recorded, and we'll stick it up on Free Webinar Wednesdays. And This may be an abbreviated version of the show, and we might have to schedule Adam to come back when we're able to see some slides and talk about things with a little bit more visual impact. But I guess we're going to turn this into a podcast today, if you will. Although I've got a really big picture of you that I could put up on the screen and just have like giant Adam head showing the whole time, if you want us to do that.

That could be the cause of the issues that GoToMeeting is having, actually, having that.

Oh, too funny, too funny. So, well, let's go ahead and jump into it. I know you come from some pretty serious chops in the digital world, and what really kind of brought us together was one of your creations out of Australia called Business Catalyst, which has now since become part of the Adobe platform. And I know within WSI we use the Business Catalyst platform under our brand name called eFusion quite often. And, you know, pretty cool web development environment with easy-to-update stuff, but by no means is that your only claim to fame. And you've since kind of moved along and you've got this cool company called Near.me. We had you on the show a couple years ago, which got rave reviews because at that point I don't think anybody had even heard the term Marketplace-driven economy. And so maybe for people that weren't able to join that show or watch the recording, maybe start off with any other history that I may have omitted about yourself that you think would be relevant to today's conversation. But let's kind of define what marketplace-driven economy means, maybe give some examples and talk about how you're kind of playing in that space now.

Yeah, you bet.

Thanks, Eric. So yeah, my background was in computer hardware back in the day when the XT computer was all famous. So I was firstly a hardware guy and started a hardware business. But margins went from 300% to 3% overnight when the Pentium started coming out and everybody was selling hardware. So I thought, well, what can you do to scale a business? And that was to get into software development. So I've been there from the start of the internet. Watched the evolution, I guess, of how things have changed. Behind every entrepreneur is a failed content management system, as they say. Content management systems became— everybody was building one. Then they became commoditized and the market consolidated around content management systems. You ended up with a handful of decent ones. Same with email marketing. Everybody was building an email marketing tool and that was popular and then that market consolidated. Became commoditized over time. Everybody was building their own engine, and then you ended up with a number of players taking over or consolidating the market. And that's when we moved on to build Business Catalyst, Bardia Hausmann and myself, back in Australia in 2004, because we saw all the disparity across these different siloed applications being content management, email marketing, forums, blogs. Ecommerce, etc. And that's what Business Catalyst came to solve for the small-medium business owner, is that all-in-one solution. Now, that was back in the day when ecommerce— and as they say, a picture tells a thousand words, and I've got a beautiful slide right in front of me now which I wish you could all see, and we'll share this deck in another session. But the story goes that everybody was building those ecommerce engines Then the market consolidated, but the overall architecture that companies like Business Catalyst, Shopify, BigCommerce, Volusion, Magento, you name it, there's a number of big e-commerce platforms out there. The architecture was centered around a one-to-many model. One store owner, lots of customers. Come to my store, buy from me. I take a credit card, it goes into my bank account, I send you stuff. And the logistics, the supply chain, the credit card processing, nice and simple and easy. And then you've got your eBays that came along, the marketplace environment, and then you could have your own store. And of course, out of that evolved PayPal, which we all know is sort of the global payment engine that connects buyers and sellers with payment processing. So eBay became a marketplace which Anybody could then have their own store in a centralized marketplace environment, and then they took care of their own logistics. And then you had pop-ups, copycats that came up in different countries, Allegro in Poland, and then you've got suddenly a move towards these market-driven marketplace economies like Airbnb, like TaskRabbit. Upwork, or back in the day as it was called oDesk or Elance or Freelancer. Suddenly these marketplaces sprung up and the way that people interacted wasn't one-to-many. It became architected for a many-to-many. Lots of providers, lots of sellers, lots of service providers, lots of product sellers, subject matter experts, and lots of customers. And the marketplace owner sits in the middle as the matchmaker between the supply and the demand side. That then brings a level of complexity, which we'll get to in a minute. But overnight, we suddenly have over— well over 10,000 different companies now in the quote-unquote sharing economy. That's a buzzword that was flying around. I don't know of virtually any real true sharing economy platforms or marketplaces. The term I like to use is collaborative economy or social commerce marketplaces because no one's sharing. They're taking something. There's a what's in it for me, and it's usually a fiat currency of some sort where it's a means of exchange of value. Some are using points, but then it's still not sharing. It's still a value exchange between the supply and the demand side. So, there's thousands and thousands of these companies now in the collaborative economy space. You've got your ShareDesks and your Desks Near Me and your Getarounds and your Sherpas and your Feastlys, as I've already mentioned, Airbnb, Uber, Lyft. And they've become what they call these unicorns that overnight have upended a whole industry like Airbnb has. But what we're really— all they've done is facilitated a way for the many sellers to connect with many buyers, and they're this matching engine. And that's the fundamental change in the way e-commerce is shifting. It's to be able to provide the buyers with an option to resell, or people who work in an organization full-time to provide their services part-time through a marketplace like Upwork, and suddenly it's this democratization of e-commerce and the marketplace economy is that almost anybody anywhere in the world can connect with other people to access or provide a product or service and do that really easily, whether that's through a website or an app on your phone. And then we're moving into the Internet of Things where you could even use voice-activated like Amazon's Echo and say, hey Alexa, book me an Uber, and it'll do it. So we're heading now towards this many-to-many approach, lots of buyers, lots of sellers, and it's shifting now towards API-driven e-commerce where you could connect anything to anything, where brands are starting to look now at how they can actually power their own marketplace And be a part of this shift in e-commerce. One of the things that enterprises have always thought a marketplace, especially an aftermarket marketplace where secondhand products they sell, might cannibalize their new product sales. Well, that's totally not the case. We'll get to a little bit more of that shortly. And by the way, Eric and Jeff, just feel free to jump in and cut me off because I will just keep talking and talking around this subject. Ramble, ramble, ramble.

It's good stuff. Yeah, I wanted to do a couple things. One is we've got a couple of new people that have been able to crack the code and get into the webinar, and I just want to make sure everybody that's on live knows that we're unable to see anything from Adam's computer. Normally we do obviously slides and presentation decks, so that's not possible. GoToMeeting is having some problems today, but I wanted to let you know, Adam, I pulled up the Near Me website and I pulled up the Desks Near Me website, so if there are any sites Maybe that you want to hop on on your end and then just kind of instruct me to go to different areas, even though we're not seeing the same screen. I can at least pull that up and then we can kind of take a look. So if there's any kind of schematics or drawings. Yeah.

I've just refreshed the link and GoToWebinar is letting me in now. So I'm not getting that error that they were showing before. So I'm actually able to share my screen at this point. There we go.

You now have the invitation your way.

Alrighty. Okay, well, that's great. Well, hopefully you can see my screen at the moment, and let's hope that the technology on GoToMeeting is working for us. Okay, so bingo!

Show us that awesome slide that you were bragging about, that if you could show it, you would show it.

Well, there are so many of them. Here we go. So, I will just give you the background. We talked about some of the different e-commerce platforms that were out there. The whole premise is architected as a one-to-many, one store owner, lots of customers, and then the eBays of the world, the Allegros, the Airbnbs, TaskRabbits, Upwork, and other matchmaking marketplace services came along, and they're beginning to be architected for many-to-many, lots of providers, lots of customers and a marketplace owner. And that we're seeing thousands of companies in the collaborative economy popping up, all different types of verticals. And that's shifting also into the enterprise space, which we'll get to. And so the idea is that we have access versus ownership in a lot of these marketplaces. People don't necessarily need to own an RV now. When they can go to a marketplace and rent somebody else's RV, supplementing the cost of owning that RV, if it's a trustworthy transaction. Trust is a whole other part of the conversation when it comes to the marketplace economy, which we'll discuss later. But there's so many different ways of being able to connect people, not just to buy products, but also to share or rent and barter. Their services. And what this is now allowing marketplace owners to get access to is line of sight through the entire product services lifecycle. It's allowing big data to be applied and to be able to run predictive analytics, APIs for everything, so that between marketplaces, a more efficient way of cross-selling, and then synergies for referrals across marketplaces. platforms can occur. For example, I might be an RV rental marketplace and people are putting— listing up their RVs for rent. And then another marketplace is RV spaces. So rather than go to an RV park, a lot of farmers throughout the US and around the world are listing up some of their farmland, allowing RV travellers to effectively Airbnb some of their space to park in a beautiful farm area rather than a crowded RV center. And so, there's synergy between the RV rental service at the end of that process of renting an RV. Suddenly, this Synergy referral pops up and says, hey, would you like to now book? Because we know that you've booked this RV, would you like to book a space at one of these farms? And it could be that that exists across different product sets too. That's where the power of the API for everything, the Internet of Things, kicks in. The main broad categories of marketplaces that we've identified are people, which is a white-labeled Upwork, Elance, oDesk, Freelancer-type marketplace; products, which is the white-labeled Etsy, Reverb, or eBay-type marketplace; places, which Everyone's familiar with Airbnb and DestinyMe, a white-labeled version of that. And then projects, which is more around the white-labeled LinkedIn or Meetup, where communities want to form and collaborate on projects. Then there's the hybrid, where any one of these— people, products, places, or projects— could lead into another. For example, some brands are starting off with a project-based marketplace where people can connect and collaborate and build community around projects that they want to launch. And then as people connect and they gain followers and likes and ratings around that project and the collaborators involved, the best of the best in that community could be allowed to provide their services within a white-labeled version of an Upwork in that particular enterprise brand marketplace that started off as project-based. And I'm going to show you an example of that in a second. And then there's the— yeah, so that's the hybrids. And then there's the sub-marketplace options where an overarching brand, for example, WSI is a good example of that master franchise, and then lots of franchisees fit within. These marketplaces can also have their own vertical white label within their marketplace. That being someone like Desks Near Me. We'll just bring that up to show that example. Let's just go off and find it. Here's Desks Near Me. I want to search for an office space somewhere. I search, I select. Great. Now, what we're able to do with this example is in the admin is set up sub-franchisees which have their own unique domain name associated with Desks Near Me. So if a large coworking organization wanted to leverage this marketplace but have their own branding, they could be a sub-marketplace. So people going in on their URL would see a subset of the inventory, and as they add inventory under their URL, everything is filtered for their URL only. But in the main marketplace, the master franchise, it will display listings across all. So that's That's something that's becoming attractive to enterprises so that their channel partners can get involved and not feel like, as is the case with eBay, if you send somebody to your eBay store, it's still eBay, and then inevitably somebody will look at your store and then go, oh, I can get that 2 cents cheaper somewhere else. So branding is important at the sub-marketplace level as well. The biggest headaches for marketplaces has been payment gateways, logistics, and insurance. They're the main big pain points. And the issue is that in the traditional model of the one-to-many, as I mentioned earlier, I swipe my credit card and the money goes from my account to the seller's account immediately. Whereas in a marketplace environment, it's often where the marketplace owner needs to be involved in the transaction. Where they're taking a commission. Now, not all marketplaces use that model, but a lot do. And so you end up with a buyer, a seller, and the marketplace owner. So you have 3 parties in the payout. Now, not all payment gateways support that. Let's take a click through here to log in, and we'll take a quick look into the payments section. What we've done with Near Me as an example, we support whole bunch of payment gateways, some of which, like Stripe, PayPal Payments, Express, Chainpay, Braintree, and others, have a better way of approaching that multi-step payout. But that's also dependent on country. So, a payment gateway can be applied per country, and depending on the country as to whether or not it supports a seamless payment experience, depending on the fiduciary requirements for that country and what that payment gateway has to adhere to. So, that's been a big problem which we've solved. Then, the logistics has been another issue where in the marketplace environment, if you're suddenly allowing, like eBay did, anybody to be a seller and lots of buyers are coming along to buy that product, how is logistics handled? Now, going off and happening to, as an individual merchant inside a marketplace, Connect Federal Express, UPS, United States Postal Service, etc. What a company called Shippo has done is to aggregate all of the— and I'll bring them up so we can take a look at it— all of the shipping carriers. And it's GoShippo. GoShippo. They aggregate all of the carriers so that They become that single API point. So, they're a marketplace, if you like, of carriers. And within the Near Me dashboard, it's then simple for a marketplace owner to go off and click on providers, add their Shippo API token, and suddenly logistics for everybody selling products or renting products, which even may require a return label, added, all that logistics is taken care of. And the cost of the courier fees, the shipping labels, all of those things are taken care of seamlessly for the end user, the customer renting or buying that product. But that's a huge problem that Shippo have solved for aggregation of lots of carriers. As I said, a marketplace of logistics. And so that's taken away a lot of the headache and pain on the logistics side.

One of the things— Question for you on that. From a logistics perspective, does a service like Shippo automatically select the least-cost alternative or the most, I guess, profitable alternative for that transaction? So somebody shipping to Northern Michigan might have a better cost structure going via UPS, whereas going downtown Chicago might be FedEx or DHL. Does it have that kind of intelligence built within it?

They allow you, so the idea is that you connect your shipping accounts for UPS, FedEx, etc. And so it's really dependent on the marketplace owner to define that. Shippo will go and grab the prices based on obviously the size and the width and the height and the dimensions of that order and send it to all of those carriers that you have connected on your Shippo account. And then it simply presents that back to the e-commerce checkout process on our side, and we let the buyer— we allow the buyer to select which one they want. So they may want a premium one with insurance, or they go for the cheapest one. So they're very agnostic. They just create the connection, pass the product order details in terms of the size, And they get pricing back from all of them. Now, yes, you can fine-tune some of those things in the Shippo dashboard to create some rules, but generally speaking, they will just get everything and let the buyer select.

Gotcha, makes sense, thanks.

Good question though. There's a lot of marketplaces popping up as we mentioned, everything from self-storage, and I'll go up to an example of that. Where are we? This is Spacer. Australia and they're upending the storage space industry with their option for people to list up and allow people to rent garages, spare space, shipping containers, you name it. And it's like an Airbnb for storage. And so these are the types of marketplaces that are popping up. Bookafish, I've mentioned the RV one. There's just so many different verticals that marketplaces are springing up in. So what can enterprises do? And I'd like to drill into a bit of an example of what's happening with Intel and their marketplace. I mentioned that Projects is a particular type of marketplace which is like a white-labeled LinkedIn or or even Facebook, although it's all public-facing. Enterprises realise that the marketplace economy is here to stay. It's not a fad, it's a trend. We've seen that with Airbnb, we've seen that with Uber and Lyft, empowering people to be part of a marketplace where they can drive people to and fro, even courier services where you might sign up as a courier service to move goods from one end of the city to the other in your spare time. As I said, as things become, you know, the Internet of Things and there's an API for everything, when you go on your lunch break, you might want to be signed up to be a delivery person and make $10 in delivering something from one end of the city because you're walking in that direction anyway. This whole democratization of products and services right across the spectrum is going to be exciting over the next couple of years, but the enterprises getting involved. And the idea is that they're not going to cannibalize their existing sales because people are operating within marketplaces already. You go to eBay and do a search on branded products and you'll see millions of dollars worth of branded goods being sold, which the enterprise is missing out on. They're missing out on 2 people: the buyer— the seller, who could have been upsold to a new product that that brand supports, and And the buyer, who in 12 months' time might be a candidate for an upsell, or at least be communicated with about some rebates, or even things like recalls. So the enterprise is realizing people are in there and doing things in marketplaces. Powering up their own marketplace will allow them to get line of sight throughout the entire product/service lifecycle. But here's an example of Intel, who aren't transacting around products. They're transacting around the community that they have, which if we go to their site and I'll just log out. The idea and the hypothesis was for them, they've got around 20 million users in the Intel Developer Network, and that's 20 million global non-Intel employees, users, developers who are passionate about Intel and have signed up to access their developer network. Now, they have a small number of those are active, you know, let's say a couple of million, of which, or from that, hundreds of thousands of passionate evangelists of their products. Now, the current state of play is that LinkedIn, Facebook, and other— let's call them marketplaces— own all the data. So how do they get line of sight and access to that data? Because it's gold to them. Forum technology doesn't cut it. It's not designed for the marketplace environment. So they started with a hypothesis that if they could power their own they've done is that people would be able to create their profile, follow other Intel developers, create projects, allow people to collaborate on those projects. So instead of a transaction, a marketplace transaction where the, the product or service is a bed or a secondhand product that I want to buy, the common object in between the buyer and the seller is the project, and the seller is the project leader, and the buyer are the collaborators who want to get involved in this particular project. And already, just in a quiet private beta, Intel have identified huge value because they've found that people like Fabrizio in Italy are putting up projects that they had no idea people were creating. For example, this is the Ultrasonic Sight, which is like a— for blind people, an electronic cane, if you like, which is linked to the Internet of Things, Intel RealSense, and also for innovators. He's got a number of followers. He doesn't have any collaborators, but the fact that he put this up here and defined this project, allowed Intel to see this and went, wow, we had no idea. And there's so many other examples of it. And so for them, the return on investment for their marketplace is they're building relationships between all of the users in that community. They can see the projects that are being built. And they're able to then connect with those thought leaders, with those projects, and surface them. And in fact, they're requiring that Intel developers list their projects on DevMesh where they— if they're going to be speaking at an Intel event. So this is just phase 1. Phase 2 is to provide private communities within this group, and Intel will have access to that, whereas— LinkedIn, Meetup, Facebook do not provide that access. So they own the data. The enterprise own the data. Another example would be, say, a phone company where— and these are some stats from a South American phone company— where 30% of the phones that were being registered on their network were coming from off the network. They weren't being bought in store. That was secondhand. Now, if that's 30% signups of phones that are being purchased off the network, imagine how many others are going to their competitors. So, if they powered up a marketplace where people could buy and sell secondhand phones or tablets or wireless-type devices, they would again have line of sight. So, when somebody sells, give them a voucher for a new device. Phone purchase in store, or to the person who bought that secondhand phone, give them a follow-up notification in 9 months' time to upgrade, because they're likely needing to upgrade if that phone's now broken. And of course, when somebody buys a mobile phone, give them an immediate upsell to buy a cell phone package with that carrier. And the idea here is that it's going to connect buyers and sellers who are already doing it anyway on eBay, but the carrier, the telco, gets to access the data and the community. And that then leads in the longer term to some big data analytics and predictive analytics because we're starting to then capture these networks and links. And this is just a pretty visual just to give you an example of how networks form. And how they can change their behavior based on peer pressure from others in the network. So, through the data that exists in a marketplace, the buyer and the seller, this is a network and link, and we can use network and link analysis in the same way that they do with criminology to identify fraud in credit card companies and banks, to identify TerraCells through call data records on telecommunication companies. We can use the same analytics engine and predict what people might do because we have what we call regression analysis on all of these data points over time. So starting off with a peer group, we can see that, okay, we have a number of people in the Intel Developer Network who cluster around each other. But we have made an assumption that the person that had the most followers was the most influential. Well, actually, the data shows us that there's 4 people behind the scenes that actually provide all of the influence within that peer group. So it does peer group analysis as well. And then based on the patterns that occur over time within those peer groups, we can make predictions on new peer groups forming and get a path to purchase. More optimized. Again, these are things that enterprises are realizing they'll have access to if they run these marketplaces. You could call it social engineering when you do predictive analytics, but that's a bit of a dirty word. But let's face it, that's what marketing is. It's a way of trying to get a decision made. And when you own network and link data, the analysis that can be done in predictive analytics is extremely powerful. And these models allow optimized influence to occur across these peer groups where the influencers and the connectors are identified and the messages are optimized throughout a time series communication strategy. So what I want to do is maybe just open up to Q&A and, and talk about— because it's, it's just on 10 to the hour and we did do a An abridged lightning run-through of all of this. I wanted to do it so that we could get some Q&A before the hour finishes, and apologies for my inability to connect earlier and optimize this time. But what brands do you know have complete visibility of their product services and customers' lifecycle? And let's talk about some of those ideas because I've got lots of background knowledge on some big companies that are doing some exciting things. And, and if you've got a client right now, we could brainstorm around that.

Cool. As a reminder, in case you joined us late, I know GoToMeeting was providing some challenges getting on. If you'd like to ask a question, feel free to go ahead and use the chat functionality in your control panel and maybe let us know if you've got a thought or an idea One of the ones that springs to my mind, we're in the process of actually working with a real estate agent, and I want to say the name of the service is LoopNet for commercial properties, but she has expressed to us a couple of times that there's really not a lot of marketplaces. And she didn't say marketplace, but now I'm thinking of it as a marketplace after chatting with you.

Right.

There's not a lot of marketplaces out there that are providing information about commercial real estate property, and so that may be an area that maybe you could talk about a little bit as it relates to, you know, the traditional real estate model where you put your property in with a real estate agent, it goes into a multi-listing system through some sort of a broker agency, and then you go to a site like Zillow or Realtor.com or any of the other broker realtor sites that are paying to have that feed tied in. That's one that springs to mind as I'm kind of listening to you and taking notes that maybe will spur some other ideas and thoughts from our audience.

Yeah, gotcha. That's a good point. As you mentioned that, 99Spaces who run on the Near Me platform, Launched and doing some cool things around commercial space, something that you might want to take a look at. But LoopNet, they are a consolidate— a data consolidation service, is that right?

I think so.

Let's see what they do. But so I guess— all right, got you. I think it is for sale, for lease. Look, we're seeing a lot of little micro marketplaces pop up where they're focusing in on a specialization within commercial property, specifically around, say, medical or dental or health in general or just tech-friendly. And so these are types of ways that people are getting in and building a very niche marketplace. And then from there, their strategy is to, okay, when we do— when we become preeminent with medical spaces, commercial space, and fitness commercial space, or other verticals, just name them, we'll then put an umbrella over all of it. So that's people coming from the bottom up and focusing in on these verticals. Specifically for LoopNet, I guess one of the things they're already doing, because they are a marketplace for sale and for lease, is do they already provide a white-labeled marketplace solution out of the box?

Yeah, I don't believe so. I think it's pretty much— yeah, I think it's the LoopNet brand, and whether the consumer has to know about LoopNet or they're relying on building their engine to the point where the search engines will recognize LoopNet as a viable SEO listing.

Gotcha.

Yeah, you know, I used LoopNet the last time I was looking for office space, and quite honestly, it's not a friendly experience at all. I was looking for just individual office space for myself, very much like 99Spaces seems to specialize in, or desksnear.me. LoopNet attempts to— they're attempting to generate revenue from everywhere. They're attempting to generate revenue from the folks that are listing and from the folks that are looking for spaces. I think it probably is fine for large commercial space, but it absolutely is not a friendly solution for small spaces.

Yeah, that's what our agent has said, is it's very expensive for her to put her listings out there, but there's really no other source of information on commercial property. You've got the Zillows and the Realtors and the Trulias and some of the others that are more consumer orientated where you can go out and find properties very easily. Those just automatically pull stuff in from the MLS listing. There may be future conversations between you and I, Adam, as it relates to this to maybe see if we can figure something out here. Yeah.

Well, this is where the 99Spaces of the world, the Desks Near Me of the world, who want to focus on a better user experience and really focus in on a niche area and provide better customer service. And so the idea is there that eventually you're going to see a lot of these niche services popping up, which, if they do it right, they could share, and I mentioned that in the PowerPoint, that this idea of collaborating across marketplaces so that— where was it? Somewhere in here— so that that referral approach can happen. Here we go. The synergy referrals across marketplace platforms and an API for everything for cross-sell, where if I don't have the inventory on my air in my space or in my marketplace, why not surface some inventory from somebody else's marketplace and get a commission from that and vice versa?

Yeah.

Because let's face it, these startups, the startup marketplaces are going off and they're using screen scraping or they're getting Mechanical Turks to grab inventory from everywhere. They're building clever scripts to do automatic scraping of a site that sends an email that says, hey, I'm interested in your space. Oh no, actually I ended up getting it From here, people go, oh, we got it from there, and they click on the link, it takes them to a little startup marketplace, and they go, I should be listed there as well, and wow, they're much better rates than the other larger incumbents are charging me for listings. So there's a lot of little tactics going on for people to upend some of these larger, less user-friendly marketplaces that are out there. But thinking long-term, I think we'll see also people connecting and cross-selling and creating synergies across their marketplace platforms, possibly not even bothering to charge on the transaction because they make maybe extra money on concierge services, an upsell on connecting, getting a commission from linking them to an Uber that was going to drive them from where they are to that office, connecting them with other service providers and virtual assistants that were in that office, because when they booked that space, it highlighted that they are a specific type of person in a particular geographic demographic, and generally we know that they also need X, Y, and Z, and that's how they monetise. So there are lots of different business models coming up around monetisation in the marketplace. It doesn't have to be a commission on the listing. It could just be a basic subscription or upsell, cross-sell options.

Thoughts, Jeff?

I've got a couple other questions, but I want to make sure I don't capitalize the— or monopolize, I guess, would be a better word. Any other thoughts on your part?

No, I'm happy to just answer any questions.

I was just trying to give Jeff an opportunity to get a word in edgewise, but since he's not talking, I'm going to go ahead and kick in. I was on mute.

No, I'm good. Oh, okay.

One of the things that jumps into my head that I want to maybe toss out for you to comment on would maybe be the role of like an association to lead the charge and to try to create a marketplace for its association members. We do work with some of the largest.

I love that idea.

I'll tell you why I love it, because associations are already communities and they're usually communities of practice. If I'm a member of an association, I'm probably in the American Institute of Certified Practicing Accountants or I'm in the doctors Proctologist Association or whatever it happens to be. I'm in a community of practice where I'm already—

Interesting you picked that example, but I'll not go down that rabbit hole.

Yeah, I don't know where that came from. And so, yeah, proctologists and accountants, maybe that's where the linkage was there. What I was thinking though is that they've already got a— they're in a community of practice So they already have marketplace credibility, and most of the time they do not want to upset other people in the community. Whereas a community of interest is a hobby, so I go to hobby sites and it's a hobby marketplace. Whereas an association, if I'm paying my dues as a member, I'm pretty serious about it. I've either invested through education, I've invested through a career, and these associations are always looking for 2 things. They're looking for non-member dues, so they need to— they want to raise money without upping the dues that they charge their members, and they also want to offer member benefits at low or no cost to them. So the idea of a marketplace where people within an association— A, there's brand recognition on that association's marketplace. People can be either swapping or offering desk space within that marketplace, or even in the case of lawyers, and this is a marketplace that is going live shortly on Near Me, lawyers who share cases. So I've got some legal cases coming through and I want to make that available for a different lawyer to help me on that because I'm just overworked. I don't have enough arms and legs to deal with all of that case, so I'll get somebody else to come in and help me. So yeah, I definitely think associations are a very powerful place to be working to get them on a marketplace, and they could be taking a clip of the transaction or they could be having people sign up on a subscription basis, so extra money income and extra member benefits. I love associations, I think they're awesome.

Yeah, very cool. I have several little notes jotted down on this piece of paper in front of me that are very well going to precipitate a follow-up phone call to you, my friend, because I got some ideas I want to run by you. So these are good. We are at the top of the hour. I know we got a little bit of a late start, so maybe just kind of trickling in any final thoughts that you'd like to share, or maybe kind of other, I guess, marketplaces that you think may have opportunities. That didn't get talked about or parting words, etc., etc.?

Sure, absolutely. Well, ultimately what we'll be doing, and we have a partnership with WSI so that we can open up the whole Near Me platform that will allow— and you can go in here quickly and I'll give you a quick look— allowing internet consultants to go in and set up and theme, adjust, content manage, and manage the workflows that occur between the buyer and the seller and the marketplace owner so that this will facilitate an accelerated development cycle for any internet consultants within WSI to go to market very quickly with a marketplace for their clients. So that's one thing. The other thing is it doesn't exclude traditional ecommerce. So, you may have a brand that you're working with and they actually want traditional ecommerce, but they know that there's these marketplace things that are happening. So, if they future-proof themselves, they can have traditional ecommerce and then turn on the option for people to sign up as sub-marketplaces within their branded ecommerce site and be resellers or sell under their own brand within the marketplace. So that would be a thought I'd like to leave with the WSI listeners, is that traditional e-commerce isn't excluded. What it does is allows somebody to go in and start with traditional e-commerce and then open up a marketplace, and then that could be a leading strategy. The other thing is too, and it prompted me earlier when you were talking about some of the real estate example. Often you have geographically diverse clients who do the same sort of thing, and they're non-competing because they deal in New York, San Francisco, and Chicago, and Sydney, and Melbourne. And they have an affinity with each other because they're part of an association, and they like each other, and they have the same integrity and values. They could set up a marketplace which allows, instead of each and every one of them going off and spending $50,000 on an e-commerce site, they all chip in and they build something that's half the cost that all of them participate in and build a marketplace that's geographically diverse but a single unified user experience that is better than what they would get if they were all doing it individually. So they get economies of scale and they get the excellence across the board, user experience excellence across the board for all of those people in that— what would you call it? That would be like when you get a bunch of people who come together and create a— not a clan, there's a word for it, I can't remember.

A tribe?

Collaboration. A tribe of business people. owners who are solving the same problem, whether it's service-based or product-based, and they say, let's all tip some money into the hat and we'll get a better solution that all of us can leverage on branding, and it creates a marketplace. Yeah, very cool.

Good, good, good. Well, this is certainly not disappointing. Like I said, I've got a tremendous amount of note-taking and I've got a few more questions in front of me and some ideas that are rattling around in my head. We will be talking soon. Appreciate everybody that was able to join us live, pushing through some of the technical issues, meeting this afternoon or morning depending on where you're at. Really just appreciate you being part of our show. We'll get the recording— hopefully it'll work, keep my fingers crossed— up on Free Webinar Wednesdays for everybody to check out. Adam, always a pleasure, and thank you so much.

This was great.

Thanks, everybody. Thanks, Jeff and Eric, and those who could make it. Apologies again, too, for not being able to show earlier, but I'd be happy to revisit, and we can have a detailed Q&A session later on. Thanks, everyone.

Sounds good. Good, good, good.

Thanks, Adam.

That concludes— yep, that concludes this week's episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. Make sure that you step out to free-webinar-wednesdays.com. FreeWebinarWednesdays.com for the recording here shortly, and share it with friends, colleagues, and coworkers. And we will look forward to seeing you next Wednesday and every Wednesday, 1 PM Eastern time here at FreeWebinarWednesdays.com. Until then, enjoy the rest of the week, and we will see you next week. Bye-bye.