Sarah Lacy of PandoDaily recently published an interesting series of videos featuring CEOs from leading commerce companies like OneKingsLane, Warby Parker and BirchBox. The video is broken out into a series of posts (part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). In the video they discuss a number of topics mostly focused on what will separate the big winners from the wannabes.

I agree with a lot of what is discussed. Competing head to head with Amazon on price or breadth is a fool’s errand. Instead, the winners will create unique brands that transcend price, and then leverage those brands to command fat gross margins (by commerce standards).

But there is also one big omission from the discussion. Today’s consumer is very different than the consumer during Zappos’ heyday. Today’s consumer has a supercomputer in their pocket 24/7. They are always on and always connected. On mobile devices they don’t have to log in time and time again to retrieve stored credit card information – they are just a simple click away from any purchase. They evangelize product recommendations not while walking through the mall, but rather by handing over their phones. The big winners in online commerce will embrace this. They will craft pixel-perfect mobile shopping experiences purposefully designed for touch interfaces. Experiences purposefully designed for two minute mobile snacking. Experiences purposefully designed for notifications received on smartphones. Mobile is the future of everything and online commerce is no exception.