It’s always nice when something you write takes off and gets picked up around the internet. My features writer Louise Jack wrote a great story a couple of months ago about “Etail 3.0″. The idea was to explain how a new breed of online retailers were not only matching high street players’ offerings but going far further to offer a range of services that simply couldn’t be replicated by traditional brands.
Anyway, we were trying to think what to call this and we came up with the term “Etail 3.0″. As Louise put it at the time:
“The first wave of etail involved online retailers undercutting their traditional counterparts on price. The second involved trying to create “experiences” online, rather than just slashing costs. But the third sees etailers surpassing their high street rivals with enhanced consumer offerings.”
We decided that since we felt there had been three distinct waves of trends in online retailing, Etail 3.0 was a good term to sum this up. While people may have used it before, we couldn’t find any other articles using this as a term in the way we defined it.
Now a comment on our website drew my attention to the fact that point out that Etail 3.0 is now being used in the last month or so as a commercial term and popping up on blogs, more blogs, Twitter and magazines - all linking back helpfully to our original article (through our aggregator website Mad).
Love it!
