Since August of 2009 I’ve been part of a great project at Mozilla. I took a look at how branded clothing and gear (a.k.a. “swag”) was sold online to different Mozilla communities around the world. There were some immediate problems to solve and some long-term strategies to develop. I used SurveyGizmo for the first time to find out what users wanted and needed from Mozilla ecommerce. One of the first solves was to build a simple page to link users to all Mozilla stores and partnerships, and give them context for making a choice:
Mozilla Foundation’s David Boswell blogs about the landing page (be sure to read community responses). At times there have been over four separate landing pages for Mozilla stores and partnered experiences. Now that this immediate need is buttoned up, I’ll be thinking about ways to aggregate the shopping cart, solutions for international shoppers and big-picture ways to align the ecommerce experience with Mozilla’s mission and brand.
I’ve been thinking a lot about best practices in internet retail because of this project, researching crowdsourcing, and looking at companies like Zazzle.com, Threadless.com, Spreadshirt.com, Etsy.com & others. Although not directly related to the Mozilla project, I’ve also started paying more attention to virtual currency and companies like Zynga and Linden Labs (Second Life).
At first blush this project feels a bit, well, secondary in comparison to the other work the Mozilla community does. But the more time I spend with it, the more I realize how key it is to the health of the internet. I think it is important for Mozilla to play an active role in online retail. And there’s room for a lot more constructive open source thinking about the role of consumerism on the Web. A playground for trying on best practices is the only way to really learn what works, and that’s how I see the swag ecommerce experience. Open source principles can translate for ecommerce and Web marketing and exist alongside for-profit business models, guiding them. Directly embracing the slowly evolving, organic negotiation between the two would be interesting. And establishing and maintaining fair standards for the consumer–and merchandiser–while keeping current with Web technologies is something I’d like to take further.
