Death of the High Street. Yawn.

Poor Play.com has announced that it will no longer fulfil orders itself, giving up the fight to be Amazon. Instead, it will act as a marketplace, enabling small vendors to reach Play’s customer base. Over 250 jobs will be lost, and what’s to stop another internet brand fading into obscurity. Is this a business model where Play.com doesn’t actually add any value to the value chain, looks identical to a hundred other alternatives, and so the customer base inevitably searches for the next (cheaper) zeitgeist? Yawn, next.

It turns out that next is HMV, a venerable institution that was recognised around the world as the finest purveyor of recorded music. In recent years, it diversified to selling movies, books, electronics, t-shirts, concert venues, tickets and even digital downloads, all linked by the theme of popular culture. This diversification wasn’t enough, the 2012 Christmas peak wasn’t enough, and its credit line wasn’t enough, so it called in the administrators.

Both of these companies are casualties of the same trend, the changing High Street and the rise of the online High Street. HMV tried to be a more complete bricks and mortar High Street, just when its consumers were abandoning bricks and mortar for online shops. Play recognised this, and is trying to build an online High Street, rather than wasting its efforts actually making (re-selling) stuff. Despite this change in strategy, I don’t think it will be enough for Play. In time I fully expect Play.com to be just one of many places to buy commodity widgets at rock bottom prices, competing with increasingly diversified supermarkets, super-e-tailers (Amazon), and consumers themselves (eBay).

The high street is changing, as it needs to in order to continue to attract shoppers, but it isn’t dying. Nostalgia as a business model is being brutally swept aside by economic realities, but there are still shops open and thriving. These are the ones that offer something more than just widgets. These shops connect with shoppers, offer advice, decomposes their needs into widgets, and make sure the widgets work together to give the expected outcome. Shoppers are starting to expect to pay extra to go to a High Street, because it will be a customised, curated experience. The opportunity is to create a hybrid, a local e-marketplace, one where the cost savings from the online High Street is combined with the service from the bricks and mortar High Street.