“Placeshifting”: The new opportunity for SMEs

We’re all familiar with the notion of timeshifting – using technology to move tasks from being done in invasive real time to less invasive “later”.

It started with the first, rather clunky answering machines back in the 70s and now with the advent of email, mobile phones, SMS and social networking has taken on a whole new meaning.

In fact, in many circles, plain old one-in-one real time conversation is so last millennium compared to the sexy new “one to many” capabilities around today.

Multiplying your opening hours

Websites too provide fantastic timeshifting capabilities by allowing you to do business whether your physical doors are open or not. In fact, the ability of websites to allow you to do business 168 hours a week roughly triples the opening hours of your regular bricks and mortar shop and quadruples the “opening” hours of non-retail businesses.

Of course most smaller business operators are yet to either grasp or realise the obvious opportunities this represents with relatively few websites allowing online purchase, booking or even a meaningful enquiry form.

But timeshifting is only one benefit the online world provides.

Because while timeshifting may multiply your opening hours by three or four times, it’s the web’s ability to “placeshift” that provides the far greater benefit.

Multiplying your customers

Placeshifting is the reason that so many Australian consumers are buying from offshore retailers. Quite simply they are making their products available to people on the other side of the world at the same time as those on the other side of the street and at prices local retailers can’t compete with.

How a product shipped individually can still be far less expensive than those shipped in bulk containers is still beyond me, but that’s a matter for the retail analysts.

Placeshifting has been around even longer than timeshifting. Mail order offered the first examples of a business selling to a customer in a remote location. And that’s been around for decades.

The amazing thing about placeshifting is just how little it now costs to achieve.

Placeshifting prices plummet

Just a decade ago the cost of reaching a global market even by website was still a reasonably expensive exercise. But these days there are secure shopping cart vendors and payment gateway services that are prepared to work on a commission basis.

That’s right, it can now cost absolutely nothing to set up the technology to sell your wares to a global market – provided you have some basic computer and communication skill.

When you take a second to think about it, that’s quite an astonishing capability. Even a stand at a Sunday market requires at least some financial outlay.

When the penny drops…

For retailers, there’s nothing quite as exciting as making that first online sale. That email alerting them to the sale is proof that the interweb thingie might just be all it’s cracked up to be.

Better still, it provides a tantalising prospect for them. That customers outside their immediate location want their products too. And there are many, many more customers outside your locality than within it.

These placeshifting capabilities will benefit any business who is not restricted by distance, such as local service providers like cleaners and gardeners. Unfortunately too many smaller businesses only restrict themselves by a lack of knowledge, open mindedness or imagination.

But the shopping cart technology that has now been around for 17 years is not the only new placeshifting technology smaller businesses are tapping into.

Virtually being there

Web conferencing and webinars are now saving those who use them thousands of dollars in both travel and productivity.

Where once customers and staff had to be in the same place to communicate effectively, these time and place shifting technologies are revolutionising meetings and other collaboration for as little as nothing but your carrier charges.

They’re yet more compelling reasons that smaller business operators need to keep abreast of technological development, for both the opportunities and the threats they represent.

In addition to being a leading eBusiness educator to the small business sector, Craig Reardon is the founder and director of independent web services firm The E Team, which was established to address the special website and web marketing needs of SMEs in Melbourne and beyond.