We work with a lot of merchants that set up shop on the many excellent store platforms – Shopify, eBay ProStores, Yahoo! Stores, BigCommerce, Magento and many more.

A very familiar pattern we see is that merchants will set up their shop on the platform, and expect traffic to somehow materialize suddenly and automatically.

In some sense, we, the Internet Guys, are to blame for this. Somehow, somewhere, we missed building the right connections between eCommerce Platforms and Marketing Platforms.

As a result, there is a clear and present Catch-22 for small businesses. In order for them to market their products, they have to first set their products up on an eCommerce platform; which don’t integrate marketing tightly within their systems, if at all.

On the other hand, in order for merchants to set up their products within a platform, they have to first figure out what kind of marketing would make sense for them in the future – so they can choose the right eCommerce platform to begin with!

What a conundrum! Perhaps we need a standardized set of marketing tools and services that are universally available, or compatible with, all eCommerce platforms. Or, perhaps we need an eCommerce platform that can hook up to marketing vendors seamlessly.

Is eBay X.commerce going to be that platform?

Amit