Left-Handed Social Commerce

We are all used to the norms of real-world commerce: I want to buy something, say a fold-up bike, so I have to find out what bike stores have such goods in stock, and I drive all over town checking them out, and trying to get a deal.

The web (1.0) changed that dynamic. I can search for fold-up bikes online, compare prices, search for reviews, and then order the bike of my dreams online. Cool.

But I am doing all the work, and even if others help me along the way with advice or recommendations, they don’t get anything for it. And the information that I accumulate along the way usually just dissipates as soon as the transaction takes place: the myriad activities are never bundled together and published for others.

Web 2.0 tools exist to better this situation, but in general, they all fall short of my dreamscape, which I refer to as left-handed social commerce.

The solution I envision will be based on a social media/social networking platform, such as Facebook. I would be able to collate various observations and recommendations made by my contacts or me, as a sort of portfolio associated with the object of my desire: in this case, a fold-up bike. Once I have boiled down what it is I am after — either a specific make-and-model or a bunch of features, like number of gears, size, price range, and so on — I want to be able to post my buy. By posting my buy I mean offering the deal to the world of vendors out there.

In some way, I would like to have the platform anonymize my request for offers so that I can avoid being pestered, and I can filter out offers that don’t satisfy my concerns. For example, I only want offers from bike stores in the San Francisco area, because I want them to be able to fix the bike if it has problems. And I only want offers from highly rated sellers, and sellers that have been in business 3 years or more. Or sellers that at least some of my contacts have recommended. And so on.

But the real flip here is having the offers flow to me, as opposed to me wandering around in the web 1.0 world of pages, following links, like a rat in a maze. Sure, the rat is smart, and can solve the maze. But I don’t want to be a rat in a maze anymore. I want everything to flow to me.

And it’s not like I am consigning the vendors to running a maze: after all, the same platform could flow opportunities to them. A San Francisco bike shop carrying a variety of fold-up bikes could tag themselves appropriately within the hypothetical left-handed social commerce system, and my deal would flow to them. They could add a few parameters — prices, models, etc. — and flow it back to me.

We’d all get out of the maze.

Ebay is a big maze, where buyers have to do the work. Amazon. Whatever. Its all designed to make things easy for the retailer or the auction house. And we run the maze everytime we buy something online.

It’s interesting that I have had this discussion — more or less — with dozens of entrepreneurs in recent years, but I have yet to see a real solution emerge based on left-handed commerce and flow principles.

I also envision that I should get credit — reputation and commissions — based on the folio I develop on fold-up bikes. In a long-tail economy, a really good folio researching the alternatives could get hits for years. I could pass along some small discount to buyers who want the same thing I bought, as well as pocketing a small commission. Why not? When this sort of thing moves to the edge — for example in a social network platform like Facebook — and out of managed sites like Yelp, why shouldn’t we get the tips?