While “decompressing” in Ohio after years of slugging it out in Silicon Valley,  Simon Rothman (formerly of eBay) had an epiphany “E-commerce doesn’t seem to work for normal people” as he put it in a recent Business Week article. Although I find blanket statements that include the term “normal people”  to seem overgeneralizing it’s hard to argue that small-town America (or how about the red state people, or maybe country folks?) have a lot of stuff just sitting around that could be sold but they don’t trust computers. Computers were invented by big-city folk, (or heathens or sodomites…whatever we people that live in the big coastal cities are commonly referred to by small-town folk).  According to Rothman many people he had come in contact with (salt of the earth blue-collar people I have to assume)  felt that ecommerce was cumbersome, time consuming, and possibly putting people at risk of hacking, malware and viruses.  Hey wait a minute that’s what I think too and I’m a raging liberal west coast urbanite.  So he came up with a platform that would overcome these roadblocks and tap into this $3 billion market for used goods that he felt was out there-  introducing  Glyde.

Rothman has been working very quietly behind the scenes for the past year with some seed money and a simple but good idea. Glyde will charge 10% of the sale number with no upfront fees and $1.25 for custom mailing envelopes provided by the company.  Instead of operating on a buyer/seller honor system where sellers are rated for the quality of product or timeliness of shipping Glyde will employ comprehensive analytics to track sales and shipping activities. The company has also filed for numerous patents on features and processes; as the Bilski Supreme Court case continues in we’ll see if those can even be claimed in the near future.

Though Glyde might not be something new and daring like the original eCommerce platforms it’s worth commending them for reminding us that sometimes you don’t need to reinvent the wheel, you just need to make it better.  Making e-commerce easier and faster should definitely allow Glyde to tap into the less computerized portions of the population and probably take some of us more tech savvy consumers with them along the way.

And for the record, I would love it if we the collective software and internet marketing community could agree upon a standardize form of the word eCommerce (ecommerce? e-commerce? eCommerce?) let’s tackle this one at the next big trade show how about?

Related posts:

1. Two small ecommerce developments with big implications
2. New kiosk for Facebook synergizes eCommerce and social media
3. Is ecommerce recession-proof?

Tags: Bilski Supreme Court case, Business Week, e-commerce, eBay, eCommerce, Glyde, hacking, malware and viruses, Simon Rothman

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