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diff --git a/wired/old/published/social shopping/social-shoppingv4.txt b/wired/old/published/social shopping/social-shoppingv4.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..782bd86 --- /dev/null +++ b/wired/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
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