Shopping 2.0: Current E-commerce Trends (Redux)
In a RWW Live podcast from last December, we discussed 'shopping 2.0'. In this analysis of the show, we explore how e-commerce has evolved over the past few years - what web technologies our expert guests are currently using, and the trends they've picked up on.
We had 4 expert guests on the podcast: Baynote (collective intelligence platform for online shopping), ModCloth (online retailer of vintage clothing), Retrevo (vertical search for electronics), and Cartfly (social commerce store network).
Editor's note: This post was originally published in December 2008. It was the second in a two-part series. Part 1 was about how shopping 2.0 sites are targeting niche customers and how that's helped them increase revenues. We hope you enjoy (re)reading these posts.
Implicit Social Recommendations
RWW Live host Sean Ammirati asked the guests whether e-commerce has changed much over the past few years. Kurt Collins, VP of Business Development of Cartfly, replied that there is now a lot of implicit social recommendations across social networks and blogs. Jack Jia, founder and CEO of Baynote, noted that "99% of the crowds" are silent and so the implicit recommendation data that Kurt referred to is very valuable. It's crucial, said Jack, to tap into the interests, likes and dislikes of that invisible crowd. He added that that it may not be 'friend' data either, as we currently tend to think of it in social networks.
Eric Koger, CEO of niche clothing retailer ModCloth, said that they pay close attention to what their customers do across social sites - e.g. in their case their users activities in Flickr, StyleHive and social networks.
Expert-Driven or Crowdsourcing?
Where there was some disagreement among the guests was on the value of crowdsourced recommendations and reviews. Jack Jia, founder and CEO of Baynote, said that traditional e-commerce and commerce in general has been expert-driven, but now the crowds are driving decision-making in retail. Andrew Eisner, Director of Community and Content, Retrevo, took issue with this - saying that user reviews are key, pointing to the expert reviews at Retrevo. It's worth noting here that Andrew also used to work in the content arena, at PC World.
We'd be interested in our reader's opinion on this issue. Clearly consumer reviews in aggregate represent very valuable data for big online retailers especially - e.g. Amazon has virtually built its entire business off the back of crowdsourced user reviews and recommendations. What's more, this type of data is highly trusted by consumers - one of the factoids perhaps lost in the commotion about Forrester's report on trust in corporate blogs, is that consumer product ratings and reviews are the second most trusted data online, behind only email from someone you know:
Yet we can also see Andrew's point of view, that there is a big place for expert reviews when it comes to consumer products online. For example, I'm more likely to read and take notice of a review of Bose headphones by a CNET reviewer who specializes in music electronics, than a review written by "lolcatzndogz67". What do you think? Perhaps in aggregate, crowdsourced data is key; but when it comes to decision-making on certain types of products, we still want to read expert reviews before we buy.
How Can Existing E-commerce Vendors Tap Into the Social Web More?
A RWW commenter called Mark commented on the original RWW Live post that he has just relaunched a social/e-commerce website. He used to have an eBay site, but now he wants to tap into the social web more. Here is what Mark wrote:
"In our previous site launch, we spent months building a database of products, opened the doors of the site, and it was just too much product, and not enough interaction with our customer base.
In our relaunch, we decided to go social first, e-commerce second. Working on our customer relationships first. The site is a transition from our successful eBay business to a more controllable blog/e-commerce solution."
I put that dilemma to our guests, starting with Kurt Collins - whose service Cartfly addresses exactly that need. Kurt said that the socialization of e-commerce can come in different forms - e.g. embedding a store in a user's social network profile. That won't replace "end destination e-commerce", but Kurt said it will "augment sales tremendously" at the edge of the network. It's all about bringing the product to the customers, rather than the other way round.
Eric from ModCloth said that their business started by using a series of open source shopping systems. He says that they still currently use an "archaic" e-commerce platform, but that blogging and direct engagement on external networks are their current tools for reaching out to ModCloth customers.
Favorite Online Shipping Web Apps
Finally, a bit of a tradition we've started on RWW Live is to ask our guests at the end of the show to name one web app in their field of expertise (other than their own) which has caught their eye. So I put this question to our 4 guests: which online shopping app do they recommend to the listeners and readers of ReadWriteWeb?
Andrew said "vertical gadget sites", but he also said that Amazon "does everything right in the world of shopping" - particularly because it recommends products he didn't know he wanted.
Eric mentioned Revolve Clothing, and what they're doing with the "category view" - allows you to see a lot more at a higher level.
Jack mentioned that he buys books from Amazon and other specialist sites, but he still goes to Google for products that he needs to do research on.
Kurt said that ThinkGeek ('stuff for smart masses') is one of his favorite sites and that Zappos is a site that many of his female friends use. He also mentioned that he buys a lot of things from iTunes.
One of my favorite sites at the moment is a new social wish list called Boxedup.com, which I mentioned in our roundup of 10 wish list websites. However, I have to admit that I've since renewed my interest in Amazon Wish Lists - their universal wish list feature pretty much does all I need.
Sean also said that Amazon is his favorite, due to related recommendations. But he had a shout-out for Glue, the browser add-on made by AdaptiveBlue.
Tell us your current favorite online shopping app or site in the comments!
You can listen to the entire RWW Live podcast on shopping 2.0 here:
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Image credit: Fosforix
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Alibaba is the biggest b2b e-commerce site now?
really interesting article, I'll read it later because bein an ebau seller I want to know all e-commerce trends.
I'd like to see some thought around Retail 2.0 in terms of web enablement of traditional retail business. Leveraging networks with people shopping online makes sense .. but it all still exists in cyberspace and there's no connection to the local shopping experience where most of us spend money daily. Where do we see web technology enhancing local retail? My business is local DVD rental. Rather than trying a shift to mail-order, or Video On Demand, I've put my catalogue online (applebox.com.au), and people rent from home and pick up at the store. This means I don't need shelves and can operate from a much smaller space than a Blockbuster. Local + web = new store economics + new customer convenience. Perhaps my business is unique in that a DVD catalogue is intrinsicly cross referenced (actor/director/genre) making an online catalogue make sense and the volume of discs and shelving requirements means the introduction of IT is cost effective (in terms of lease costs saved). But there must be other opportunities out there. Will local retail look the same as it does now, in 10 years time? What if Amazon started having local outlets .. if the stock is available locally (or at least the short tail of it) I'd always search and order online and pickup local to a) saving shipping and b) get it immediately. And all those local outlets could combine into one large distributed warehouse to ultimately give greater stock holding than what Amazon probably has today. What if Netflix started operating local outlets (like APPLEBOX)?
Blend local with web and what opportunities will emerge?
Very interesting..... Now social networking isgetting more popular than emails.... I think!
I'm a big fan Play.com. The buying experience is slick, mainly due to the ease of browsing/searching and the lack of delivery options. You wouldn't cite the company as a leader in social media integration - they held back on user reviews for a while - but they're tied in now, and they don't detract from the reasons for why I took to using the site years ago. Leveraging social systems is great, but they won't save your business if the products and core buying experience aren't up to scratch.
In comparison, a purchase on Amazon feels like a more far more drawn out process - albeit, the site with the lowest price usually wins me over, even if there's a clunky sign-up & log-in to contend with.
Looking ahead, it'll be nice when product reviews are tied to long standing, genuine user profiles (preferably Twitter @usernames); it'll be much easy to get an overview of a reviewers persona on the occasions when you come across one of those wildcard reviews in contrast with the status quo.
we have a real web 2.0/3.0 way of selling; people get paid to sell, as well as the buyers.
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commerce is very interesting ,it seems.I really wonder.
I find the results somewhat hard to believe actually.
It's rather farcical that people "trust" information from the Yellow Pages print version when they carry nothing more than advertisements. Although I must say that I do trust their phone numbers as being accurate.
I also see business web sites as a rather glaring ommission from the survey. More and more people are using the net for searching information. I tell people to drive traffic to their web sites from offline advertising, i.e. don't advertise your business, advertise your web site.
A business web site can carry hundreds of pages of information that you just can't buy in offline media and done correctly, will answer prospect's questions and pre-sell them before they even contact you.
Although some of the more traditional forms of advertising seem to be still ranking well, it would be most interesting to see a comparison of these survey results from responses 5 years ago.
Cheers,
@RicRaftis on Twitter
I'll read it later because bein an ebau seller I want to know all e-commerce trends.
Although some of the more traditional forms of advertising seem to be still ranking well, it would be most interesting to see a comparison of these survey results from responses 5 years ago.
I was expecting much in depth discussion in shopping 2.0 trend. We have seen social aspects in shopping sites like Kaboodle.com, thisnext.com and experienced the uses of crowd sourcing in shopping sites like crowdstorm.com.
I think few areas are missing when we discuss about the current shopping trend, i.e. "consumer 2.0", A.I. based shopping. Sites like shopnics.com has attempted to achieve some of them and at the same time Amazon has taken lead on this.
I think it will be interesting to see in near future, how shopping sites make changes to adopt real time streams from twitter and facebook.
Fantastic insight. We recently had an implementation of TaF4 Commerce on a very popular e comm website in India called www.Indiaplaza.in . One would be able to see the widget in action on every product page- I was surprised to see that they have close 40% of the click back from the announcments that have been made via TaF4 Commerce resulting in conversions.
The announcment/recomendation trend has been, emails taking the first postion and surprisingly IMs was the second and Social Network being the next one. There were hardly any bookmarking- which is obvious and people want to start conversation around the product and the most prefered communication is the one on one.
Looking at the implementation of Indiaplaza.in a lot of e com websites have started seriously evaluating this kind of a conversation platforms for their properties.
Hi Richard,
Great post and kudos on assembling a solid panel of speakers - understandably there's a lot of interest on the implications the social / semantic web is having on marketing and as the technology and services become more widely widespread this interest must increase as marketers wise-up to their consumers' evolving habits.
I've contributed a number of posts on this subject both from the perspective of consumers and from the perspective of marketers to http://SocialcComputingJournal.com - I hope anyone reading this finds them useful:
Consumers - "Semantic Web Shopping - A 'How To' for the Immediate Future" - http://socialcomputingjournal.com/viewcolumn.cfm?colid=818
Markerter - "Semantic Web Marketing" - http://socialcomputingjournal.com/viewcolumn.cfm?colid=810
I'm linking this post to the comments of the 2nd article - solid stuff here : )
Cheers,
Mike
"I tweet @headup"
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noted that "99% of the crowds" are silent and so the implicit recommendation data that Kurt referred to is very valuable. It's crucial, said Jack, to tap into the interests, likes and dislikes of that invisible crowd.
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There's so much that can go wrong with buying stuff online, it's hard to know where to begin researching the pitfalls. I've kind of stopped doing it now, you just have to accept it as a known pitfall and hope for the best.
Background research is often the best way, if you have the time - I read something along those lines here: BeatThat
information is very clear. good and understandable explanation. super-topics. Thank you for sharing a very nice web site.
Mostly, though, credibility on the web increases when you are perceived to be acting against your own self interest. Admitting mistakes, asking for help, linking away to competitors, providing full-text feeds, letting people criticize you in comments, they all add to the credibility of a website.
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There's so much that can go wrong with buying stuff online, it's hard to know where to begin researching the pitfalls. I've kind of stopped doing it now, you just have to accept it as a known pitfall and hope for the best.
Mostly, though, credibility on the web increases when you are perceived to be acting against your own self interest. Admitting mistakes, asking for help, linking away to competitors, providing full-text feeds, letting people criticize you in comments, they all add to the credibility of a website.
how about alibaba ?.. as long as i know its a big e-commerce too.
this article make me know many thing that i don;t know before now i'm bookmarking this web for my next visit, lucky me when find and leave my comment in this website thanks:)
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Richard, thanks for that interesting info.
Generally we trust more people we already now like our email friends. But what if they are fake or trojan horses ? I receive once i a while emails from ebay or amazon exaclty for that reason. You never now, I would be cautious in any case.
It's all about finding the right sites who review products, there could be sites full with affiliate links who just want to sell you something.
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Mostly, though, credibility on the web increases when you are perceived to be acting against your own self interest. Admitting mistakes, asking for help, linking away to competitors, providing full-text feeds, letting people criticize you in comments, they all add to the credibility of a website.
Well of course this makes a lot of sense.
I mean I would trust my friend's emails over some company's blog, that is common sense.
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what about wishpot.com for wish lists? It is way cooler than others mentioned and I have been using it for almost a year.
Those all look like great places to live.
what about wishpot.com for wish lists? It is way cooler than others mentioned and I have been using it for almost a year.
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Admitting mistakes, asking for help, linking away to competitors, providing full-text feeds, letting people criticize you in comments, they all add to the credibility of a website.E-commerce trends seems to be more in demand as the shopping facilites are provided online.Its is good policy admitted to the comfort level of the user.
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thinkgeek is one the app which i like - zappos is also cool but thinkgeek is much better then zappos
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