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diff --git a/wired/old/published/social shopping/social-shoppingv3.txt b/wired/old/published/social shopping/social-shoppingv3.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8290544 --- /dev/null +++ b/wired/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.
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