diff options
Diffstat (limited to 'old/published/social shopping')
4 files changed, 4 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/old/published/social shopping/social-shopping.txt b/old/published/social shopping/social-shopping.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..06e58a4 --- /dev/null +++ b/old/published/social shopping/social-shopping.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +Pundits have long accused the internet of being little more than an oversized shopping mall and with the Holiday season in full swing more and more of us are using it as one. The rise of so-called web 2.0 has given birth to a new range of shopping sites that aim to improve internet shopping and raise it to a level of sophistication and ease that the Mall of America can only dream about.
Everyone knows about Amazon, Froogle, Ebay and the other big name players, but searching for a product, whether you know specifically what you want, or you're just browsing for Christmas ideas, is just about as time consuming as wandering through the real mall. Of course you do avoid the crowds and the musak, but it's still far from perfect.
However, there's a whole crop of new shopping sites that can make your experience quicker and more enjoyable. Most of these sites don't sell anything at all, rather they help to distill, condense, search, recommend and otherwise scour the web in search of the best deal on whatever your heart desires. Instead of browsing for what you want, these sites can deliver it to your door.
The most sophisticated of these new sites is Offertrax, an innovative online shopping service that combines the best features of social bookmarking tools with RSS feeds to help you track your online shopping.
Offertrax allows you to create what it calls "tracks." Tracks are containers for bookmarks of products you interested in. When you find something you like on another site, click the bookmarklet that Offertrax provides and give the bookmark a title, description and a choice of images to represent the product. You can then add the bookmark to any of your existing tracks, or create a new track.
In addition to bookmarks Offertrax lets you add reviews, notes and control whether or not your tracks are public or private.
So far it sounds pretty much like del.icio.us or other bookmarking sites, but here's the difference: Offertrax gives you an RSS feed and will send you announcements whenever prices change or special offers are available.
Offertrax sends out bots once an hour to check all the bookmarks in your tracks. If they find a change you'll be notified in your RSS reader, or when you visit the site if RSS feeds aren't your bag.
While Offertrax lets you add reviews, the reviews are intended to be you doing the reviewing, what would be nice is a way collect other reviews from around the web. I'd like to see is a way to bookmark existing reviews and add then to my tracks. For instance, if I'm shopping for a new camera, I'd like to have all my camera bookmarks be joined with bookmarks to reviews on site like dpreview.com in the same track container. That way I could see my research and track products all in one interface. As it is the track feature is the only dynamic off-site feature.
This would probably be the time to note that Offertrax is thus far a beta product and I'm sure that they'll be adding new features in the future.
Stylefeeder is a shopping community site that also borrows some ideas from the social bookmarking sites. To say Stylefeeder is just a social bookmarking site focused on shopping is not entirely accurate. It is that, but because the bookmarks are products and because the community is public, Stylefeeder is actually a shopping site in its own right.
Rather than trying to maintain a wishlist on Amazon, Yahoo and others, Stylefeeder allows you to condense everything in one place. Stylefeeder offers a nice bookmarklet for your browser's toolbar. When you're on a site that has something you'd like to buy, just click the bookmarklet and it will be saved to your Stylefeed.
The bookmarklet features a nice piece of Javascript that lets you select any image on the bookmarked page to use for that bookmark. It's so dead simple even your grandmother could use it.
Stylefeeder has all the features you'd expect from a social bookmarking site such as tags, ratings, RSS feeds and groups. Unfortunately Stylefeeder doesn't offer RSS price updates like Offertrax, but the community around the site is definitely larger so there are more reviews and tips.
Online shopping site Mpire is another big player in the new world of online shopping. Mpire is a destination site in its own right, but for consumers the real draw may well be the recently release Firefox plugin.
Rather than trying to track prices from the site (which you can also do if you like), the plugin allows you to take the power of Mpire's price comparison tools to any site you visit. The plugin essentially put the MPire site data just a click away from nearly any shopping site.
Once installed, clicking the Mpire plugin tool will pop up a small bar at the bottom of your screen that compares prices, offers review links and other tools for the item on the page you're browsing. Similar to Farecast, the airline price comparison site, there are predictive graphs in the Mpire plugin indicating whether the price of an item is likely to go up or down based past sales.
Unfortunately, right now the Plugin is only available for Firefox, but hopefully we'll see something similar for Internet Explorer and other Browsers in the near future.
Boddit is another new bargain shopping site that's one part search engine, one part price tracker.
Boddit works by pulling in prices from a number of big internet discount trackers like Dealnews, Slickdeals, Fatwallet and many more. Rather than searching all those sites individually, Boddit lets you search them all at once.
Boddit also offers what they call "web search, Boddit-style" which amounts to creating a frame with a toolbar on the left of your browser window and performing searches of other sites in another frame. Normally I hate anything that creates frames in my browser, but Boddit’s was actually helpful and made searching multiple sites much quicker.
For instance with a single click I was able to jump from searching Pricegrabber to Froogle to Yahoo! Shopping and more. Unfortunately because Boddit apparently sends the search info as POST data, you back button will warn you about resubmitting a form, which is annoying, but worth the trade off in my opinion.
Boddit will also search and browse auctions on Ebay, Half.com and Yahoo! Auctions and even Craig’s List.
All these sites and other like them offer you tools to improve your internet shopping experience and in the end none is really better than the other, simply different. Your best bet might be to combine them all and create your own ultimate shopping experience. After all, when it comes to deciding how to spend your hard-earned cash you can use all the tricks you can find.
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/old/published/social shopping/social-shoppingv2.txt b/old/published/social shopping/social-shoppingv2.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5cf481c --- /dev/null +++ b/old/published/social shopping/social-shoppingv2.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +
maybe needs something more descriptive at the top (i put in a marker) along the lines of "tell it what you're shopping for and it tells you where you can find the best deal. ask it to keep you updated and it will send you text messages, emails, smoke signals whenever the price goes down at any of the web's biggest e-tailers."
that's probably necessary even if you end up turning it into a "news" story. but the quotes about how this is totally going to change online shopping for everyone belong above that description if you get some good ones.
try to de-personalize it. change you --> users throughout. i did this in some sections that i edited, but i left other sections untouched, so read it through.
also, if it's re-written as a news story, you might have to cut one. which one would you cut?
With the holiday season in full swing, more and more of us are using the web as an oversized shopping mall. Thankfully, the rise of Web 2.0 technologies has given birth to a new breed of shopping site that can search and scour the web for the best deals.
Sites like Offertrax, Stylefeeder, Mpire and Boddit don't sell anything at all. Rather, they aim to improve our web purchasing intelligence by doing our bargain hunting for us and telling us when to swoop in for the kill.
_descripto here_
The most sophisticated of these new sites is Offertrax, an innovative online shopping service that combines the familiar features of social bookmarking tools with RSS feeds to help users track potential online purchases.
_or here_
Offertrax users create "tracks," or simple collections of bookmarks pointing to products found on the web.
On the suface, Offertrax has the same functionality as del.icio.us or other social bookmarking sites. However, the site also provides notifications via RSS whenever prices change or special offers are available.
Offertrax checks all of its customer's tracks every hour, sending out price change notifications whenever it encounters them. If a shopper doesn't use an RSS reader, the notifications are available on the company's website.
In addition to bookmarks Offertrax, lets users add reviews, notes and control whether or a track is public or private. Offertrax's price tracking service is currently still in beta.
Stylefeeder is a shopping community site that also borrows some ideas from the world of social bookmarking sites. Unlike Offertrax, which tracks a user's items privately, Stylefeeder hosts a searchable public community for shoppers.
Rather than trying to maintain a wishlist on Amazon, Yahoo and others, Stylefeeder allows you to condense everything in one place.
Stylefeeder offers a nice bookmarklet for your browser's toolbar. When you're on a site that has something you'd like to buy, just click the bookmarklet and it will be saved to your Stylefeed. Images and descriptions can be assigned to each item in a user's Stylefeed.
Stylefeeder doesn't offer RSS price updates like Offertrax, but the community around the site has built a searchable database full of reviews and tips.
Mpire, another big player online shopping. Mpire is a destination site in its own right, but for consumers the real draw may well be the recently released Firefox plugin.
Rather than trying to track prices from the site (which you can also do if you like), the plugin allows you to take the power of Mpire's price comparison tools to any site you visit. The plugin essentially put the MPire site data just a click away from nearly any shopping site.
Once installed, clicking the Mpire plugin tool will pop up a small bar at the bottom of your screen that compares prices, offers review links and other tools for the item on the page you're browsing. Similar to Farecast, the airline price comparison site, there are predictive graphs in the Mpire plugin indicating whether the price of an item is likely to go up or down based past sales.
Unfortunately, right now the Plugin is only available for Firefox, but hopefully we'll see something similar for Internet Explorer and other Browsers in the near future.
Boddit is another new bargain shopping site that's one part search engine, one part price tracker.
Boddit works by pulling in prices from a number of big internet discount trackers like Dealnews, Slickdeals, Fatwallet and many more. Rather than searching all those sites individually, Boddit lets you search them all at once.
Boddit also offers what they call "web search, Boddit-style" which amounts to creating a frame with a toolbar on the left of your browser window and performing searches of other sites in another frame. Normally I hate anything that creates frames in my browser, but Boddit’s was actually helpful and made searching multiple sites much quicker.
For instance with a single click I was able to jump from searching Pricegrabber to Froogle to Yahoo! Shopping and more. Unfortunately because Boddit apparently sends the search info as POST data, you back button will warn you about resubmitting a form, which is annoying, but worth the trade off in my opinion.
Boddit will also search and browse auctions on Ebay, Half.com and Yahoo! Auctions and even Craig’s List.
All these sites and other like them offer you tools to improve your internet shopping experience and in the end none is really better than the other, simply different. Your best bet might be to combine them all and create your own ultimate shopping experience. After all, when it comes to deciding how to spend your hard-earned cash you can use all the tricks you can find.
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/old/published/social shopping/social-shoppingv3.txt b/old/published/social shopping/social-shoppingv3.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8290544 --- /dev/null +++ b/old/published/social shopping/social-shoppingv3.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +With the holiday season in full swing, more and more of us are using the web as an oversized shopping mall. Thankfully, the rise of Web 2.0 technologies has given birth to a new breed of shopping site that can search and scour the web for the best deals.
Sites like Offertrax, Stylefeeder and Mpire don't sell anything at all. Rather, they aim to improve our web purchasing intelligence by doing our bargain hunting for us and telling us when to swoop in for the kill.
Instead of simply a storefront through which you browse just as might the aisles of a department store this new breed of shopping sites brings the store to you. Tell a site like Stylefeeder what you're shopping for and it will help you find the best deal by aggragating prices and delivering them to you via email or RSS feed.
The most sophisticated of these new sites is Offertrax, an innovative online shopping service that combines the familiar features of social bookmarking tools with RSS feeds to help users track potential online purchases.
Ben Carcio, co-founder of Offertrax, says, "gone are the days where customers simply land on merchant page and expect to only see a "Buy Now" button. As customers grow more sophisticated so must the sites that server them. Carcio believes users new expect, "trustworthy product buying guides, detailed user reviews, rich media, price alerts, and access to exclusive offers without spam."
As Carcio points out, email has been so badly abused by spammers that "emergent user controlled technologies like RSS and blogs will be the most effective way for sellers to reach out to interested buyers."
To take advantage of the opt-in, spamless offering of RSS, Offertrax users create "tracks," or simple collections of bookmarks pointing to products found on the web.
On the surface, Offertrax has the same functionality as del.icio.us or other social bookmarking sites. However, the site also provides notifications via RSS whenever prices change or special offers are available.
Offertrax checks all of its customer's tracks every hour, sending out price change notifications whenever it encounters them. If a shopper doesn't use an RSS reader, the notifications are available on the company's website.
In addition to bookmarks, Offertrax lets users add reviews, notes and control whether or a track is public or private. Offertrax's price tracking service is currently still in beta.
Another big trend in online shopping is toward predictive pricing. Using past data as a map, predictive pricing attempts to tell consumers whether a price is likely to go up or down.
Predictive pricing is yet another way in which the consumers now have access to more data than retailers. In fact Carcio sees a future where, "merchants will have to come to grips with the fact that the majority of product conversations will occur outside of their sites." He also adds that "merchants need to assist customers in getting smarter about product purchases."
Until merchants themselves catch up, if they ever do, bargain hunters might want to look at Mpire, another big player in the new breed of online shopping. Mpire makes use of predictive pricing and offers a Firefox-only plugin which essentially puts the MPire site data just a click away from nearly any shopping site.
Once installed, clicking the Mpire plugin tool will pop up a small bar at the bottom of your screen that compares prices, offers review links and other tools for the item on the page you're browsing. Similar to Farecast, the airline price comparison site, there are predictive graphs in the Mpire plugin indicating whether the price of an item is likely to go up or down based past sales.
The problem with predictive pricing though is that unlike something fairly static like airline prices, retail goods come and go, stock level fluctuate and concerns other than prices come into to play.
As Jupiter analyist Patti Freeman Evans says, "People aren't necessarily that patient." The question isn't just is the price going to drop, but as Evans says, "prices have to drop in the time frame in which a customer is interested."
Both Mpire and Offertrax also offer some social networking aspects to their services but neither is as extensive at the popular shopping community Stylefeeder. Stylefeeder borrows some ideas from the world of social bookmarking sites and unlike Offertrax, which tracks a user's items privately, Stylefeeder hosts a searchable public community for shoppers.
Stylefeeder offers a nice bookmarklet for your browser's toolbar. When you're on a site that has something you'd like to buy, just click the bookmarklet and it will be saved to your Stylefeed. By browsing the site and comparing your wishlists with other users you can find similar products, read reviews and find out about discounts.
Stylefeeder doesn't offer RSS price updates like Offertrax, but the community around the site has built a searchable database full of reviews and tips.
Jupiter analyist Patti Freeman Evans is cautiously optimistic about the future of online retail. She says these new sites "are a great opportunity for consumers to get into the game and get information themselves rather than relying of the retailer for that information."
"We're still looking at what the effect of these new sites will be," she adds, "The degree to which people will participate in this is still uncertain."
***wrap up
>>>>>>>>>>this is where I'd like to put some nice punchy quotes from Jupiter if possible
All these sites and other like them offer you tools to improve your internet shopping experience and in the end none is really better than the other, simply different. Your best bet might be to combine them all and create your own ultimate shopping experience. After all, when it comes to deciding how to spend your hard-earned cash you can use all the tricks you can find.
Full reviews (Monkey Bites links)
Offertrax: http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2006/11/offertrax_an_in.html
Mpire: http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2006/11/online_shopping.html
Stylefeeder: http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2006/12/stylefeeder.html
Quotes:
- Merchants will have to come to grips with the fact that the majority of
product conversations will occur outside of their sites. They also can't
expect customers to simply volunteer to provide reviews on their site.
- The microscopic conversion rate of merchants (<3%) is masked by the fact
that industry grows at almost 100% per year, but this growth is bound to
slow and competition will increase. So, merchants need to assist customers
in getting smarter about product purchases. This can be done by providing
effective buying guides and user product reviews, but merchants have to see
that alot of conversation is occouring outside of their sites on blogs,
MySpace, Friendster, etc. So the ones that will survive are the ones that
see that they need add value on their site, while allowing for customers to
take their data and aggregate it on services such as Offertrax.
- As we collect data it makes sense to show some price forecasting. We would
likely partner with a group to provide this.
So, the Offertrax beta is now four weeks old. But, unlike most companies in
"beta", its a "real" BETA, so we're busy watching and polling our users as
we set to launch the next set of refinements. Some parts of how I answer
your questions will be rolling out over the next three months or so, but
feel free to mention any of it in your article.
Offertrax is changing (or will change) the way people shop online and if so
how?
Offertrax creates an exciting new way to shop by allowing individuals to
create their own personal shopping guides. These guides can be personal or
shared with other shoppers. The shared guides create groupings of shoppers
interested in the same products. Merchants can then push exclusive offers to
these groups of interested consumers. To push these offers a merchant is
charged a fee set by the creator of the guide, Offertrax takes a commission
and pays the guide. The customer benefits from trusted information and
exclusive offers, sellers benefit from being able to directly target
extremely interested customers, and the guide creator can benefit from
making some money for their time.
What do you see as the future of online retail from a consumer's
point-of-view?
Well, gone are the days where customers simply land on merchant page and
expect to only see a "Buy Now" button. Customers seek trustworthy product
buying guides, detailed user reviews, rich media, price alerts, and access
to exclusive offers without spam. Merchants have abused email so badly that
emergent user controlled technologies like RSS and blogs will be the most
effective way for sellers to reach out to interested buyers
... the RSS bit is what I see as the focus, does Offertrax see it that way
as well? Do you have any additional thoughts about that?
We are incredibly charged up about how RSS can change the relationship
between buyer and seller, but we don't want to oversell RSS simply as a
technology for technology sake. Customers care little of how we do it, and
more how we make them smarter about buying. That said, the great revolution
of RSS is that it is pure opt-in messaging tool. It's opt-in nature is what
makes it so powerful and if implemented correctly give that power back to
the customer. People are realizing that when they give their email address
to a merchant they have effectively lost control. Although most sites adhere
to an opt-in policy, there are clever workarounds, and in some cases illegal
violations of privacy policies. So email marketing is broken and spam reins
supreme. Enter Offertrax. We see Offertrax as a trusted intermediary
between the buyer and the seller, and the only way to provide this is to
base our solution around RSS and other user controlled technologies.
What are Offertrax's long term goals?
Our long term goal is to create the premier user controlled community for
shopping guides and buying information. We view it as an effective
destination for sellers and buyers to collaborate on the process of buying a
product, where they can feel safe that we won't abuse their privacy and
provide them will relevant information.
Who do you see as your direct competitors?
We see two groups as competitors, the existing shopping comparison sites,
and the emerging shopping list tools. The shopping comparison sites offer
many of the same tools we provide, but with critical differences. For one,
we ask the customer to take control of the guide, this allows for more
customer control, and hopefully these guides will touch on topics not
normally covered by the likes of CNet or shopping.com. To use a buzz word,
Offertrax provides users the ability to create "long-tail" product guides.
In addition, the Offertrax price tracking tool allows customers to track any
product, while most shopping comparison engines only cover a small
percentage of the total shopping sites in existence. The second group is the
shopping list tools, such as Kaboodle, Wists, MyPickList, StyleFeeder. These
are simple tools that allow people to list product they want. Offertrax can
function this way, but we look for deeper interaction such as user reviews,
notes, price comparisons, and customer endorsements. In addition, the seller
has no direct way to participate and are force to work with more passive
affiliate or advertising systems. Essentially the seller is kept out of the
conversation.
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/old/published/social shopping/social-shoppingv4.txt b/old/published/social shopping/social-shoppingv4.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..782bd86 --- /dev/null +++ b/old/published/social shopping/social-shoppingv4.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +With the holiday season in full swing, more and more of us are using the web as an oversized shopping mall. Thankfully, the rise of Web 2.0 technologies has given birth to a new breed of shopping site that can search and scour the web for the best deals.
Sites like Offertrax, Stylefeeder and Mpire don't sell anything at all. Rather, they aim to improve our web purchasing intelligence by doing our bargain hunting for us and telling us when to swoop in for the kill.
Instead of simply a storefront through which you browse just as might the aisles of a department store this new breed of shopping sites brings the store to you. Tell a site like Offertrax what you're shopping for and it will help you find the best deal by aggregating prices and delivering them to you via email or RSS feed.
Ben Carcio, co-founder of Offertrax, says, "gone are the days where customers simply land on a merchant page and expect to only see a "Buy Now" button. As customers grow more sophisticated so must the sites that server them." Carcio believes users now expect, "trustworthy product buying guides, detailed user reviews, rich media, price alerts, and access to exclusive offers without spam."
As Carcio points out, email has been so badly abused by spammers that "emergent user controlled technologies like RSS and blogs will be the most effective way for sellers to reach out to interested buyers."
To take advantage of the opt-in, spamless offering of RSS, Offertrax users create "tracks," or simple collections of bookmarks pointing to products found on the web.
Offertrax checks all of its customer's tracks every hour, sending out price change notifications via RSS whenever it encounters them. If a shopper doesn't use an RSS reader, the notifications are available on the company's website. In addition to bookmarks, Offertrax lets users add reviews, notes and control whether or a track is public or private. Offertrax's price tracking service is currently still in beta.
Another big trend in online shopping is toward predictive pricing. Using past data as a map, predictive pricing attempts to tell consumers whether a price is likely to go up or down.
Mpire, an online shopping community site is currently testing the predictive pricing waters. One of the more popular features on Mpire is the Firefox plugin which essentially puts the MPire site data just a click away from nearly any shopping site. If you're browsing on Amazon and want to know the price at another retailer, the plugin can tell you as well as make guesses about future price trends.
As Jupiter analyst Patti Freeman Evans says, "People aren't necessarily that patient." The question isn't just is the price going to drop, but also, as Evans says, "prices have to drop in the timeframe in which a customer is interested."
Predictive pricing has proved a strong draw for the airline price search site Farecast. The problem with predictive pricing in traditional retail is that, unlike the fairly static realm of airline routes, retail goods come and go, stock levels fluctuate and concerns other than price influence consumers.
Mpire founder and chief marketing director Dave Cotter points out, "the higher dollar value the more value there is in the predictive price." So far Mpire has focused on predictive pricing for internet auctions on sites like Ebay and Craig's List. "The thing our users like the most is to able to see new and auction based prices in a single view," says Cotter.
Both Mpire and Offertrax also offer some social networking aspects to their services but neither is quite as extensive as the popular shopping site Stylefeeder, which hosts a searchable community for shoppers.
So will consumer driven sites like Stylefeeder change the way we shop? Evans says it depends, "I think that destination retail websites will be with us for a long time."
What social sites like Stylefeeder offer is new and more targeted way to get to the traditional online retailers.
"The biggest opportunity may be in niche areas with passionate consumers," Evans adds.
Evans is cautiously optimistic about the future of online retail. She says these new sites "are a great opportunity for consumers to get into the game and get information themselves rather than relying of the retailer for that information."
"We're still looking at what the effect of these new sites will be," she adds, "The degree to which people will participate in this is still uncertain."
All these sites and others like them offer you tools to improve your internet shopping experience and in the end none is really better than the other, simply different. Your best bet might be to combine them all and create your own ultimate shopping experience. After all, when it comes to deciding how to spend your hard-earned cash you can use all the tricks you can find.
Full reviews (Monkey Bites links)
Offertrax: http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2006/11/offertrax_an_in.html
Mpire: http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2006/11/online_shopping.html
Stylefeeder: http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2006/12/stylefeeder.html
\ No newline at end of file |