Two broad questions jumped out at me on this issue:

1. What role should communications play in online commerce?

2. Can ‘open’ communications work within a ‘closed’ walled garden?

The answer to the first question is actually very straightforward. Communication is at the heart of all commerce. People do business when they converse. Today that interaction between buyer and seller may be an email, or IM, or a blog comment, or just reading a review. But it could be also be video chat and will often be a plain old telephone call. In practice, the consumer journey moves between different modes of communication at different stages of the sales cycle and in no particular fashion.

The challenge then for players in online commerce is to facilitate these interactions between buyer and seller – to provide the touchpoints that take the commercial discussion a step further to a conclusion that could be online or offline. The good news is the tools are there today for developers. Acknowledging my BT-bias, BT’s Web 21C SDK is a great example of a set of web services that enables developers to integrate communications services into the fabric of their application/user experience. The likes of Jangl, Jaxter and indeed Skype promise similar.

However today, the leading lights of online commerce have held back from embracing communications as web services and embedding them as linchpins of their user experience. This brings us to question 2.

Communications, especially voice-based ones, threaten any web site with a business model based on containing interactions between its members within a walled garden. Taking the discussion off site fuels the grey market in a nutshell.

And so we have a conflict … buyers and sellers want to interact in many different ways in the sales cycle, but online markeplaces want to constrain those interactions to a narrow set that fit their business model. As I see it wherever there’s a conflict between people’s needs and existing solutions, there’s a massive opportunity, particularly in the realm of online commerce that is still very underdeveloped in the SME market. And that’s the opportunity the team at BT Tradespace is working away on – to build a platform that will facilitate conversations between businesses and their customers such that they can do business on their terms.