I have blogged about alice.com before, and while I still think they have one of the greatest, most disruptive operating models to come along in a long time, I learned today that I was wrong about one part. I thought that they sold the data about purchasing history (without personally identifiable information)
to the manufacturers of the consumer packaged goods (CPG) that they sell at cost, with free shipping to their customers. Instead they give the data back to manufacturers who place ads on the site, which isn’t a huge difference, but worth mentioning.
But today I was actually talking with an employee of Alice (evidently one of the founders assigns, as an analogy, a type of animal to each employee that somehow reflects their personality), known as the Irish Setter for reasons we didn’t go into.
The discussion was around how to get people to rethink how they buy their CPG and he talked about an iPhone application they have. When you are running low on toothpaste or dish soap or whatever, all you have to do is pull up the iPhone app and wave the UPC code in front of the phone and it will put that product in your shopping cart on Alice. No more shopping lists. So in the time it takes one person in a household to tell the shopper in the house to get more Crest toothpaste, it could be in your online shopping cart.
Wow.
Now think about who could expand the use of this? What if you are in a store like Barnes&Noble and you find a book you like, but you don’t have to have it right now. What if amazon.com had an app that let you scan the book and let you buy it for less on their site. No writing down the title or remembering it, or to go out to amazon to order it. It’s in your shopping cart right then and there. And now that amazon is in so many different product arenas, you could do that in almost any store and know you are getting a better deal. It’s a big punch in the arm for the people paying for the storefronts, but business is business.
Too bad alice.com doesn’ t have it’s own bar code. Amazon would be wise to put Alice in its own shopping cart, right next to Netflix (which I have blogged about before).
-Ric
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