Emerging from the Deep Web

Posted by Jacob Harris Tue, 16 Aug 2005 09:55:00 GMT

After a long period of working in relative obscurity to the web at large, my employer Alacra has now launched a store to sell some of the premium content to the public. Gentlemen, I present to you (in Beta form), Alacra Store

It’s a very interesting time for us here at Alacra. Although we are a small company compared to the media behemoths that surround us (ie, Thomson, Lexis, etc.), we have always managed to thrive by delivering agile and powerful solutions to our customers and making their happiness our #1 priority. And although I can’t really talk about it, there are great things afoot. For more analysis, see the always excellent Fred Wilson. I particularly like it when he says

I have been involved with a lot of companies over the years, but very few, if any, are as loved by their customers and are as unknown to the rest of the world as Alacra.

But that may change shortly. Hopefully not the “loved by their customers� part. I am talking about the “unknown to the rest of the world� part.

That’s us. And if there is one thing I love even more than the new technologies we will be using with the store, it’s the fact that I can finally show people the stuff I (and my able colleagues) have been working on.

Posted in Web Commerce | Tags alacra | no comments

The Internet and Delivery Services

Posted by harrisj Wed, 06 Apr 2005 17:56:00 GMT

This New York Times Article Online Shopping Makes New York a Cardboard Jungle has an interesting quote on why FreshDirect has succeeded in delivering online groceries in New York (where I live and am a customer), while so many other delivery services have failed (even in New York)

"New York is an ideal environment for online grocery shopping," said Patti Freeman Evans, a retail analyst for Jupiter Media, an Internet consulting firm. "A time-starved population that is geographically concentrated and Internet-saturated: that's just what you want."

This seems to nail the real reason why many online stores failed during the dot-com boom. If you can make shopping at your site cheaper, easier, and faster than shopping in a brick-and-mortar place (that was still a big if for a lot of places), you still could fail. I imagine a lot of seemingly good business on paper died due to high delivery costs (for nationwide grocery-delivery services; FreshDirect ramped up neighborhood by neighborhood) or because they assumed that too much of their target audience actually wanted to shop for their service on the Internet (or even knew what it was) in the first place.

Posted in Web Commerce | Tags freshdirect | no comments