For the past several months my mother has been knitting these wool handbags pretty furiously.  Every girl who sees them seems to think that they are cute/awesome/insert good adjective girl would use to describe handbag.  The point of this post (sorry mom) is not the handbags, but more about commerce and the way that the internet has changed and is continuing to change the way that we do business.

My youngest brother keeps urging my mom to set up a store or auction on eBay to unload her bags, I on the other hand suggest she sets up a basic webpage.  Times are changing- in order to begin selling a product to the public, the start up cost is now extremely low.  Granted you will be more successful the more exposure you recieve, but you no longer need to sell through middle men or set up your own brick and mortar store.  As a producer, I have less incentive to sell my product to Nordstrom.com than I do to set up my own website Suesbags.com. 

I think more and more we are going to see that brick and mortar stores are going to have to become increasingly customer service oriented.  I think people will pay more for the opportunity to test drive the car or try on the suit than they will for the actual product, because they will increasingly be able to search the entire country or world for the best possible price available.  At the same time, start up costs for producers to sell their products directly to consumers seems to rapidly be dropping to a very modest amount.