Most of us have been shopping online for 15 years or more. I remember my first ever online purchase. It was on Amazon. I couldn’t believe how easy it was. To this day Amazon remains the benchmark of how to serve customers.

For someone like me, who doesn’t live in the country where he was born and raised, online shopping is a thing of beauty. I can send birthday and Christmas presents to family and friends at good prices, avoiding any postage charges because the gifts are being delivered domestically. For people who are at their busiest at this time of year, it is convenient, quick, secure and good value.  What more can you want?

Ironically, I’ve been doing some work with a provider of an ecommerce platform that allows retailers and merchants to extend their coverage across marketplaces. Not just Amazon and eBay, who consume not far off two-thirds of all global ecommerce, but all their international counterparts, as well as a host of other smaller or more niche marketplaces. Having been a consumer for a decade and a half, it’s been a fascinating few weeks seeing how things work from the other side of the transaction.

There’s one thing I’m sure of. The numbers for online are only going in one direction in the future. Indeed, we’re looking at not much more than the tip of the iceberg of what is possible on the web. And by all accounts, the web itself will be but a mere frippery compared with the ‘Internet of things’.  Change is a constant :-).