Meet the new ecomm?
Ecommerce startup Alice got some nice business press last week around the launch of its site.
The concept, say the founders, is a novel one: they’re acting as a clearinghouse for CPG products, and compiling consumer data to share back with manufacturers. Rather than buy wholesale and sell at retail, Alice is only a platform, taking a fee for sales. Manufacturers control the pricing, and the fees pay for across-the-board free shipping.
On the surface, this sounds like an innovation. But is it really so different from what has come before? Amazon has a wealth of services designed to let companies sell direct to consumers, aggregate data, and defer shipping responsibilities–just like Alice.
Other not-quite-a-third-party structures have been attempted online, too, just not with exactly this structure. Consider Gloss, which was a “brand neutral” ecommerce site owned by three different cosmetics companies. Gloss.com operated as an independent entity, with the three owners paying relative shares of the operating costs (and the profit, theoretically). Sounds a lot like Alice, just with a different ownership structure.
Alice is a novel approach to retailing as an ecommerce site; the UI has lots of interesting details that will be reviewed here shortly. But the business model, while clever, is less than all-new.