Grooster Blog: September 2010

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 As an entrepreneur, it's good to occasionally sit back and reflect on your business and where it's going. One way to do this is with some structured industry analysis. I like to structure my thoughts using Michael Porter's framework for industry analysis called Porter's Five Forces. You can get a good sense of the underlying structure of your industry when you apply the framework.

The Five Forces framework looks at competition holistically.  It's important to look at competing businesses (rivals) and also at broader competitive forces like the bargaining power of customers, the threat of substitutes, and supplier power.

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Unless you've been hiding under a rock, you'll know that recently there has been 1) a massive increase in sockeye salmon in the Fraser River and 2) a huge increase in group or social shopping sites in Vancouver.  Just a year ago, there were record low numbers of sockeye and no social shopping sites in BC.  Are these related?  Maybe not, but here is a quick comparison for fun...


There is a crazy amount of sockeye salmon right now (30 million vs. 1.5 million last year); the most we've seen in nearly a century and they're practically jumping into the fishing boats. There's also a growing mound of group and social buying sites, with hundreds of new deals penetrating the city. Although there's a massive increase, I'm not sure if I'll eat much more salmon this year. And, I doubt I'm going out to dinner, spas or buying more using the
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I need to stay on my toes in the hyper-competitive flash buying space. I would say that ecommerce overall is changing so rapidly. Boundaries of traditional online shopping are being pushed. It takes constant research to stay on top of the trends. I want to share some trends I'm tracking and excited about.

Sharing: People sharing products, sales promotions, sites, etc is critical to online retailers. Word of mouth is the best form of marketing. Enablers of sharing like Facebook, Twitter, Buzz, Digg, Reddit...and many more make it so easy to share. New sharing platforms are sprouting up making it even easier for ecommerce vendors to generate word of mouth.

Recommendations: Amazon.com paved the way with a fantastic recommendation system. This is the whole "if
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I attended the GROW 2010 tech conference last week at the Vancouver Convention Center. It was an amazing conference with such a high caliber of speakers. Also, I had the pleasure to be interviewed by Michelle Sklar from Techvibes. You can watch the video here: