The fact that we all have technology at our fingertips has caused a disintermediation within traditional commerce, and significant disruption for retailers big and small. Consider the impact of Netflix on Blockbuster and local video stores, or how Amazon upended book buying. What we know for sure is that innovation, and the speed at which a business is able to innovate, is no longer an option. Rather, it is paramount to survival.

In the next decade, we’ll see more change in the commerce landscape than in the past 100 years combined.The reason? Four mega trends being driven by consumers are dramatically changing buying and selling habits as we know them. Merchants of all types—from brick-and-mortar retail outlets to non-profits, to manufacturers and even those selling online, need to ensure they’re keeping pace or risk going the way of Blockbuster, Borders and the dinosaurs.

Mobile

Smartphone sales are on such an aggressive upward trajectory that some estimates suggest there will be up to 50 billion connected devices (beyond just smartphones) by 2020 and each consumer will have approximately seven devices connected to the Internet. Beyond just making phone calls or sending text messages, people regularly look up directions, research products while in-store, chat and compare with friends and family, search for deals and even pay for their morning coffee with their mobile phone.

These intelligent, always-connected devices and the consumers using them to their full potential are pushing merchants to react quickly, or die. Businesses that don’t have a mobile commerce strategy are losing out on significant revenue, and that’s only going to continue to accelerate.

Local

Not long ago the most impressive features of online shopping were the ability to find out which stores were located in your neighborhood and determine which might have your item in.

Now, there’s an app for that!  By leveraging inventory sharing and local mapping, buyers can now access real-time inventory data while on the go, browse through sales and deals tailored to their individual preferences and even get suggestions based on things like frequently visited restaurants, clubs, hotels and more. This is powerful stuff.

The merging of mobile and local is also leading to the creation of entirely new business models and opportunities for merchants and consumers alike. A great example is that people are now able to get paid for snapping photos while out and about in their cities. How cool is that?

If you’re not taking full advantage of the ability to reach customers based on stated preferences and proximity, you’ve already fallen behind.

Social

Commerce is an inherently social endeavor. Not long ago, a customer would try on a sweater while in-store and ask her friends for feedback before purchasing. Today that same customer can just as easily try on the sweater, snap a photo of herself wearing it, share it on her social network of choice and get a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ within minutes from multiple friends in various locations. There are apps that will share what a person’s friends have purchased on social sites or allow users to share local recommendations with one another.

The explosion of consumer interest in social networks has spawned the so-called social commerce opportunity. In fact, transacting within social networks is predicted to go from a billion opportunity in 2011 to a billion opportunity by 2015.

The challenge for merchants? How to effectively leverage a customers’ social graph to build an additional commerce channel within the social networks themselves. We’re beginning to see early signs of this with some of the group gifting apps and the ‘social shopping mall’ concept that allows sellers to offer their products directly to hundreds of millions of Facebook users.

Digital

Digital has changed everything—including how we use and think about currency. People now have the ability to bump phones together to pay off a friendly wager, order and pay for a meal entirely via a mobile device and transfer paper checks into their account by snapping a photo with their mobile phone.

Similar changes are occurring in-store. Consumers can pick up an item off the shelf, scan the barcode using their mobile phone and immediately find out if the same item is available online or down the street for a lower price.

The digital revolution is here, it’s real and it has leveled the playing field for both buyers and sellers of all shapes and sizes.

The Future

As the mobile, local, social and digital trends drive our lifestyles, the pace of innovation will determine which businesses will go boom or bust. At the end of the day, merchants want to return to the business of being merchants. They want to find the best things to sell to consumers and they want to create the best shopping experience a consumer can have. Those that are nimble and seek to adapt quickly to emerging consumer behaviors will not only survive, but thrive. One thing is for sure—the future will look nothing like the past.

What do you think commerce will look like in 5-10 years?

Matthew Mengerink is vice president and general manager of X.commerce, the first end-to-end, multi-channel commerce technology platform designed for all the ways consumers choose to shop today. Matthew leads the integrated open commerce platform group and is responsible for ensuring that eBay Inc. builds a strong, robust developer community across the eBay, PayPal and GSI technology platforms to amplify merchants’ businesses.

To hear more about mobile payments, check out our GigaOM Mobilize conference Sept. 26 and 27 in San Francisco.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Johan Larsson.

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• Mobile payments: forecasts, technologies and opportunities
• NewNet Q2: Google closes the quarter with a bang
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce

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Because of their internet betting internet site and also more than eight hundred betting outlets, Betfred can certainly claim to be one of the most well known bookies in britain.

A good thing about the Betfred internet site may be that it’s quickly recognizable as a brand and this makes users feel at ease straight away. It also helps experienced users associate the new format of gambling with the customary retail outlets. Almost everything relating to the Betfred online website is easy to grasp due to its clear and simple design and style.

New customers are usually given a selection of promotions, which include a £50 Betfred free bet to try in the sports division of Betfred New customers to the internet casino segment will be able to receive as much as £500 in free bets chips and new clients in the online poker segment may receive as much as £400 in a welcome bonus.

Betfred sports betting internet site resembles that of several other internet bookies in terms of its layout.. A listing of sports is usually exhibited down the left hand side of the webpage, which makes it quick and simple to find the correct game to be able to wager on. Up and coming tournaments or live in-play tournaments are usually displayed all the way down the center of the web page.

Betfred also has an even more thorough in-play component.. It highlights popular sports taking place across the world live and provides small boxes with a few betting choices. Additional betting markets may be accessed simply by simply clicking these boxes. There’s even a commentary option, that enables customers to hear virtually any live event taking place.

A great function Betfred utilizes, that’s not always found in some other gambling internet sites, will be the virtual element. Users are able to wager on a selection of computer created games by using this service. The betting methods are identical however this may be a welcome inclusion to the internet site when ever there might not be a great deal of live sports activity happening at that moment.

The Betfred internet website includes a pretty standard internet casino component. The business sold the internet casino segment at a £27 million gain in early 2009, which suggests it is far from the primary focus and emphasis of Betfred.

The Betfred website offers recognizable and easy to use user functions.. Customers have total influence over their own costs up to a chosen limit. It helps prevent the chance of users investing far more than they can easily afford and accumulating large debts along the way.

A lot of internet betting wesbites show in depth information and facts at the bottom of the screen. Betfred performs this too, but it really isn’t particularly in depth . Nevertheless, Betfred does provide a comprehensive listing of contact details for example telephone numbers, e-mail and also postal addresses which can be reached using a link towards the top of the screen. This element will save time and effort and also worry, because it allows for users to easily pick which part of Betfred they need to get hold of.

Unless you really don’t give two hoots about the world of technology, it’s highly unlikely you would have missed the big brouhaha between San Francisco-based startup Square and VeriFone, a payment processing services provider. VeriFone accused Jack Dorsey’s product of not being secure and being easily hackable. Dorsey denied.

This week’s dust-up makes me wonder if VeriFone quite understands its own business. To me, they are a company that provides payment-processing services to big retail outlets, fast food chains and other large transaction volume establishments. That’s what really makes them a good company. Square isn’t going after those customers. It’s going after people who would rather not be VeriFone’s customers. Earlier this year, in a conversation, Square COO Keith Rabois told me that

“Most of our competitors (including the likes of VeriFone and Intuit) focused on 7 million merchants who have the ability to get merchant accounts from say Visa or MasterCard. We are going after 26 million folks who are not merchants in a classic sense.”

When I look at Square, I see a company that’s all about helping payment processing for a different class of customers: you, me and the guy selling apricots at Sunday’s Farmer’s Market. Square is about transactions that are more peer-to-peer in nature. These kinds of transactions are mere crumbs on trail to a much bigger economic trend.

The New Peer-to-Peer Economy

For the lack of a better term, let’s call this trend a peer-to-peer economy. Here, transactions happen between individuals or a group of individuals and not between corporations and individuals.

Just look at AirBnB, a perfect example of a peer-to-peer economy company. It offers a platform for folks to rent rooms (or villas) from other folks. The company takes a piece of the action for making the connection between the buyer and seller — who more often than not, are individuals. Typically, this would be an economic transaction between a traveller and an hotelier. Several other iterations of this basic idea have emerged; for instance, OneFineStay is doing peer-to-peer vacation rentals. RelayRides is another startup that allows you to share cars.

One of the companies I am absolutely fascinated by is New York-based Kickstarter, which I think is less a company and more a socio-economic movement.

KickStarter is a simple site that marries patronage and commerce. Artists come and list their projects and get in touch with friends and supporters, who pledge their money. If the money needed by a project is pledged, the artists get to work. If not, it’s back to the drawing board for them.

In less than two years, Kickstarter has come out of nowhere and is now helping projects raise as much a million dollars a week — from individuals like you and me. It helped raise a lot of money for open-source Facebook rival Diaspora and the iPod watchbands TikTok and LunaTik.

The Network Is the Dollar

This peer-to-peer economy is a throwback to an older way of life, where folks used to barter for goods. It was a different kind of economic transaction, but still it was an economic transaction.

The onset of industrialization brought in mass production and mass consumption into our societies. The Internet and by extension, mobile is going to help change that.

One of the things the Internet enables is our ability to connect with each other very quickly. These connections can go beyond sharing of tweets, photos and links.

The network is a springboard for services and platforms that enable one-on-one (or one-to-many) interactions. The easy to use tools — web and mobile — make it easier for like-minded people to congregate and engage in commerce.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more companies try to tap into the shift to the peer-to-peer economy. The winners will be those with big platforms and the likes of Square who provide enablement services. Perhaps next time, VeriFone needs to remember that.

Image courtesy Seattle Municipal Archives

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More and more retailers have seen the advantages of epos systems and have decided to integrate this form of technology onto their shop floors. Understanding your customers and sales is critical to making profit in the competitive world of retail and using epos systems is ideal for making this picture much clearer.

Knowledge is power and retail epos systems provide the sort of knowledge that can help businesses to thrive and exceed their sales expectations. Epos systems have the capabilities to show all sorts of data and statistics at the touch of a button which can then be interpreted and taken on board to make sales more efficient and profitable.

Epos Systems – Knowing Your Best Sellers

Epos systems are essential for businesses that have a high turnover of products because it gives a real-time picture of sales to retailers and gives a clear indication of which are the best and worst selling items on your stock list – which obviously allows retailers to make an informed decision about which products it would be most profitable to stock. Being competitive is essential for any retail outlet and using advanced retail cash registers will help to ensure that they are competitive by facilitating an increased volume of sales.

It is clearly apparent that the whole process of sales in retail outlets is fairly complex and it is important for retailers to use the types of technology on the market which will make the whole thing much more straightforward. The implementation of epos systems is beginning to increase world wide as the benefits of electronic point of sale solutions are proving too good to be ignored for any longer.

Making use of epos systems will radically alter the sales performance of a retail outlet and they are an extremely cost effective means of increasing the number of sales that an outlet can generate each day. Talking to retail computer solutions experts is always the best starting point for any outlet that is looking to integrate epos systems into their premises.

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Barnes & Noble stores aren’t going to be the only place you can snag a Nook soon. Nope, it seems that the boys in blue will be hawking the ereader starting April 18. Apparently the units are even in the backrooms of some retail outlets right now so who knows, some might slip onto the show floor by accident before the 18.