Symphony of Feeds
One trend that feels clear but confusing is the future of content and e-commerce. Clear that merchants will need more content. Unclear and confusing because no merchant can afford to create enough quality content despite what Mark Schaefer says in Content Shock. 

We agree and disagree with Schaefer's math too. Content Shock is about using content as advertising and we agree those days are gone. We disagree because content is still KING for merchants. 

Without content traffic doesn't convert. And no conversions means you are a nonprofit and didn't know it. Feeds and content curation are the answer. 

We wrote that last sentence like we know what the future holds. No such luck, but we know merchants can't create all the content they need. We also know content curation creates more awareness and engagement faster than anything else we know about, so ipso facto content is important and we must curate it faster, better and with ever lowering not escalating costs. 

And that all sounds likes feeds and Anthony Musselwhite's tool to us. What do you think? 

Ecommerc's future is going to be a symphony of feeds. Use SellWare.com to help manage the sell anytime, anywhere future that is coming fast.

Designing Tomorrow's Ecommerce Today
Added artist Sara Havey's magical knitting gnome to the fastest "views" Haiku Deck I've ever created (300+ in 24 hours) because it is a perfect example of the New Ecommerce's crowdsourcing and DIY future.

The deck is divided into three sections:
* Current Ecommerce Best Practices.
* Rise of the Social / Mobile Web & Social Shopping.
* Crowdfunding, Crowdsourcing and DIY.

Is it possible to create tomorrow's ecommerce website TODAY? Is Sara's gnome knitting? You bet!

Why Etsy.com Is Crowdfunded Gamification
When I saw the staggering difference between Etsy.com's pagespread (pages in Google) vs. Red Envelope, one of my favorite gift sites from back in the day, something very DIFFERENT was going on. 

Etsy.com 19,000,000 pages in Google. 
RedEnvelope 31,000 pages in Google. 

At first I thought the power of Etsty.com was in its User Generated Platform approach. Some of the power is in the framework, but another key driver is the soft gamification they employ to focus spotlights on some artists and product categories. 

Etsy.com requires email marketing since 19,000,000 pages means finding anything without curation is nearly impossible. Instead of straight curation based on a known competitive rule set Etsy.com gamifies much like a Vegas slot machine. 

Vegas slot machines use serendipitous condition. We pattern creating humans believe we create a pattern when we pull the single arm of these "bandits", but there is not Stimulus-Reward response. 

Randomizing "winning" means addiction is easy, quick and complete. Etsy.com randomizes their curation so each artist is sure their moment in the sun is around the next corner. One more pull of the single arm will surely produce a winning response. 

The risk of this gamification is the algorithm doesn't find content fast enough to put off an artist's desire to stop game play. The good news is Etsy.com's engine is the ONLY reinforcement. 

When an artist creates an Etsy.com site they drive social traffic to it and some of that traffic, since it is highly segmented and qualified, will convert creating the first round of reinforcement with no cost to Etsy.com other than the quickly depreciating community code. 

The gap between initial acceptance, use of an artist's social net to create their first conversions and the point when an artist stops game play is when Etsy.com's algorithm must rescue the content. With so much game play (19M pages), Etsy.com knows an artist's lifecycle probably within minutes of the change from phase to phase. 

So YES Etsy is gamified crowdfunding since the platform makes a tremendous return on the first conversions, those that come from the artist's push to their social net, and cost of new artist acquisition is reduced by scale and existing artist advocacy (something that is also mathematically predictable).