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Friday, April 28, 2006

Ultimate Online Shopping



Years ago when I was at Kelkoo, I thought about what would make the ultimate online shopping experience and drew a diagram to visualise it.

What we have seen since then is the gradual evolution into this nirvana by the major shopping players. Price comparison can find you the best price and show you where to buy and now even do product comparison to compare features. There are some opinions sites such as Ciao that let users submit merchant and product reviews too.

So, is there anything still missing? Does online shopping have anywhere to go now? Of course it does...

The trick now is helping people find what to buy by leveraging the power of crowds and showing the buzz around products. How many of us go with recommendations from friends or trusted people (colleagues or magazine reviews)? What about when we go into a music store - how many of you go the bestsellers section first to give you an idea of what everyone else is buying?

Bestsellers can also be misleading as why would the product with the most sales necessarily be the best one for you. Sometimes we see a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby the top product is the most visible, sells more, and thus stays in the top slot. What if product buzz was measured by active recommendations from users and how much discussion was based around it?

Social Shopping 2.0 - here we come!

posted by Philip Wilkinson at 3:12 pm

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I agree - I often find it hard to know which products to buy and spend a lot of time researching on the web.

I'm curious now!

4:46 pm  

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