But, whether we like it or not, we can't Grinch out; so we'd better start thinking about the gift-giving season now and get it over with. And since your friends at ReadWriteWeb are huge geeks, we thought we'd amuse you with a few Internet-enabled oddities that might actually make your obligatory retail purgatory a little more bearable.

If there's anything worse than shopping for a loved one's gift, it's shopping for a loved one whose preferences, tastes and needs are a complete mystery. Don't worry: it doesn't mean you're insensitive. You've just got your mind on other things.

The solution: For quick, decisive, and possible all-online gift-buying, coerce every potential gift recipient into signing up at Wishzilla. The creators of this site have kept the clear-cut, actionable sensibility of the gift registry while maintaining the element of surprise. Here's how it works: users log in with Facebook (or create an account) and then start bookmarking their gift wishlist all over the Web. Once the list is done, it's locked. Signed, sealed and sent to Santa. What items have been purchased and by whom remain a secret until the wrapping paper gets torn away.

Everyone wins, and no one is left feeling awkward about that good-intentioned but ill-advised sweater.

2 & 3) Customized Clothing for Him, Her, Hym, Etc.

We've recently been exposed to the wonderful world of e-spoke apparel. We actually just made up the term e-spoke as a portmanteau of electronic and bespoke; basically, there are a few sites out there that allow for high-quality and entirely customizable wearable goods; in fact, some of them are very forward-thinking, technologically.

For the dress shirt-wearer in your life, we have ShirtsMyWay, a site that lets the user completely customize their ideal of collared and cuffed perfection. Our Twitter research has shown that some folks find the site a little spendy; but seriously, a beautiful dress shirt designed to your exact specifications and measurements is worth the extra cost - which, we might add, is significantly less than most other customized apparel experiences.

And for your feminine side, we have Shoes of Prey. The URL alone takes no prisoners, and neither will your fierce creations. Heels on these completely customizable beasts only elevate the wearer a modest 3.5 inches at their highest, but the ability to branch beyond the dyed-satin-bridesmaid-shoe paradigm of shoe customization is more than enough incentive to check out this site.

4) Storenvy

If Craiglist, eBay and Etsy had some kind of inter-website relations and made a Web baby, it would be Storenvy. In a prettily designed community setting, users can set up buyer and seller accounts. The site is a series of independent online retailers and shoppers who browser across all of those stores at once, interacting with each other by watching what notes and ratings they leave on products and stores throughout the site. Check out the social features in action here, or just set up an account and start having fun.

Better yet, get your friends to set up accounts and thus remove some of the guesswork from gifting.

5) Regretsy, the Gag Gift You Can't Resist & Will Never Live Down

Rubber chickens, whoopie cushions, every sadistic and horrifyingly cheap Secret Santa atrocity - none of it can match the horrors found on Regretsy. We actually feel pity for the people who buy or receive the Etsy-fueled inventory from this site. If you ever wondered what kinds of jewelry can be made from animal feces or exactly who makes embroidered toilet paper, you have found your Web-enabled holy grail. If not, well, you're in for a good laugh and at least a few ideas for passive-aggressive office gift exchanges. Forced, semi-professional merriment will never be the same.

So there you have it, folks! You never have to leave your three-monitor array of addictive Internet connectivity to satisfy the whims of the potential gift recipients in your life. Just use these tools and a little personal judgment, and all your holiday shopping-related worries can be laid to rest.

We just hope we have a similarly good list when it comes to last-minute shopping; god knows we plan to procrastinate as long as possible, helpful tools notwithstanding.

Amazon already has a similar speedy checkout system known as "1-Click." When activated, customers can associate payment methods with a frequently used shipping address, such as a home address, to quickly complete purchases without having to fill out their name, address, and credit card details.

Although not designed to replace 1-Click, the new PayPhrase system is even easier to use and more flexible. Using this system, shoppers don't have to be signed in to the site with an Amazon account as is necessary with 1-Click. That saves an extra step and could lead to more impulse buys as there's no "cooling down" time, however brief, between seeing something you want to purchase and then finalizing the transaction.

The PayPhrase system also allows for the creation of multiple PayPhrases and PINs so you can associate different addresses and methods of payment with each other. For example, you could additionally have a corporate credit card tied to your office address or a pre-paid credit card your children use tied to your home address. 1-Click checkout, on the other hand, only allows for the combination of one address and one method of payment.

The PayPhrase technology will go live across all of Amazon.com as well as on several third-party sites that use "Checkout by Amazon," a service that lets other retailers checkout customers by using their personal and payment information saved on Amazon's servers. At this time, DKNY, Jockey, Patagonia, Buy.com, J&R, and Car-Toys have announced they will add the PayPhrase system on their sites, too.

Is PayPhrase the Future of Mobile Transactions?

Clearly, the new PayPhrase technology has been designed to make online checkout easier, but could there be more to it than that? Earlier this month, the company launched a mobile payments service which allows mobile application developers to integrate Amazon's checkout system into their mobile software and mobile websites. The mobile payments system also allows for the integration of the 1-Click checkout process, so there's no reason to doubt that the PayPhrase technology will now also be added to the payments platform as well.

With PayPhrase, the process of making an online purchase takes far less steps than any other checkout system today. Even PayPal forces you to sign in, choose payment methods, and complete your transaction before being redirected back to the retailer's website. While a few extra steps aren't a big deal on the web, when you're on a mobile phone, every delay makes it that much harder thanks to slower internet connection speeds, tiny keyboards, and, more often than not, a lack of time to get involved in any long process. If you can't checkout in a minute or so, it's generally not even worth bothering until you're back at home on your broadband-connected PC. But with PayPhrase, you can checkout incredibly fast - only two steps are required: one to enter your special phrase and another to enter your PIN. Although Amazon hasn't made any formal announcements about integrating PayPhrase into their mobile platform just yet, they must have had it in mind when they designed this technology.

Not too long ago, mothers were still considered to be a hard group to reach through mobile applications because they tend to be late adopters. The iPhone's mainstream success has changed this, however, and iPhone moms have now become a desirable target demographic for marketers.

Greystripe is a brand-focused advertising network and obviously has an interest in making this group attractive for advertisers, but the statistics in this report seem pretty solid. Greystripe found the 1,294 respondents who filled out this survey through house ads on its own network.

The iPhone Mom

According to Greystripe, 96% of mothers with iPhones are involved in their family's purchasing decisions and 40% are the sole decision makers. Eighty percent have attended at least some college and are slightly more likely to have received a Graduate degree than the rest of the iPhone user base. The age of the children in these families skews slightly older, with 29% of the moms having children between 0 and 4, while 43% have children between 15 and 17.

How iPhone Moms Use Their Phones: Shopping and Keeping the Kids Entertained

What is more interesting, though, is how these moms use their iPhones. Fifty-nine percent of all iPhone moms let their children use their phones and 41% download games specifically for their children. Twenty percent also download educational content for their kids.

With regards to shopping, 79% of all iPhone moms use their phones for 'shopping related activities.' The majority of these activities consist of locating stores (60%). Thirty-nine percent also use the phone to compare prices. Nineteen percent of iPhone moms download coupons, 23% look for items on sale and 37% use their phones to learn about products.

When it comes to using the phone in stores, 42% of the mothers who responded to the Greystripe survey said that they regularly use their phones at the grocery store. Grocery list applications - or just the Notes app on the iPhone and iPod touch - are the most popular uses for the iPhone and 19% of all moms use these. Thirteen percent of moms also use the phone to look up prices in the store itself - which explains the popularity of apps like Red Laser.

As Greystripe's founder and CEO Michael Chang told us last week, this data shows how the iPhone has become a tool for everyday life for this demographic. This group tends to have a large influence over everyday purchase decisions in their families and these iPhone moms often use their phones to make a good number of these decisions, which make them an attractive target for marketers.

This study also shows that there is a large market for apps that are specifically geared towards this demographic, including mobile price comparison apps or apps that can deliver mobile coupons - and a lot of iPhone dads will probably be interested in these apps as well.

Says Ask President Scott Garrell, "Searches for coupons on Ask.com have shot up almost 50% in 2009. With the holidays approaching, we know this service will help us make an impact with our users."

In early August, ReadWriteWeb covered Yahoo's recent Deals launch. Similar to Yahoo Deals, Ask Deals aggregates coupons and sales in a separate and easy-to-use shopping channel. However, when it comes to search, Yahoo redirects users to the Yahoo Deals page while Ask blends deals directly into standard results. In an effort to save consumers time, Ask also attempts to link directly to coupons and savings that are listed up front. For example, when you search for clothing, deals are listed from best to worst in terms of percentage of discount. From here users can share deals via Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Delicious and Digg.

Sale news is available to members via the website, email and the Ask Deals Twittter account. Users can also install the Ask Deals homepage skin to see the featured "Deals of the Day". To install the skin visit Ask.com/skins.

The process works not only with traditional coupons but with customer loyalty cards, too, which are typically used for in-store discounts, points, and other special offers provided by the retailer to regular customers. Since most stores already run their own in-house programs for this, MoLo Rewards is introducing a way to link the existing programs to their mobile platform. The incentive on the retailers' part, says the company, is that a mobile system such as this would dramatically cut down on fraud while also cutting costs associated with mailings and printings. They can also use RFID tags on store shelves to distribute coupons to customers walking the aisles.

In addition to the coupon processing, the MoLo Rewards system tracks your purchases on the backend in order to provide you with targeted coupons and other offers based on both your spending habits and your physical location. As you use the mobile coupons, you earn MoLo points, which can then be redeemed for "rewards" which include things like laptops, game consoles, bikes, gift cards, and so on.

NFC vs RFID

One drawback to this program - at least here in the U.S. - is its use of NFC technology. NFC is much more popular in European and Asian markets where it's already used for everything from micropayments to file sharing. With this in mind, MoLo Rewards also offers RFID as an alternative. This allows the application to work with any phone as all the consumer needs to do is attach the company's RFID tag to their phone in order to participate. Also available are "show and go" coupons, which are basically a low-tech feature of their application that lets you show the coupon on your phone's screen to the cashier so they can then enter it manually into their system.

MoLo Rewards is currently in beta as they work to add more retailers to their system. In the meantime, those interested in registering can do so here.

The daily deals section is by far the most interesting feature as users can check for deals in the verticals of their choice and be redirected to daily sale sites like Smart Bargains and Woot via Sellout.Woot. In this case, Yahoo finally gets a chance to really showcase their 2007 Woot partnership in a shopping experience that isn't a maze of click-thrus. For those readers who are already following Woot on Twitter, you may want to also follow Yahoo Deals and increase your chances of scoring cheap computer equipment or stereo gear.

As for the coupons section, if Yahoo Deals gains real momentum, coupon clippers might be found abusing office supplies (namely toner cartridges and paper) across the country. One great way to combat the waste of old school coupon clipping would be for Yahoo to offer a mobile version complete with scannable bar codes. This way a deal finder could simply load up their mobile phone with the correct bar codes and cashiers could scan the jpegs.

According to the blog post, there are only a few steps necessary to get up-and-running with Google Checkout on your site, a process they claim will only take "a matter of minutes." (That may depend on how much inventory you sell, however.)

After signing up for your Google Checkout Seller Account the next step is to list the products you want to sell in a Google Docs spreadsheet. The process couldn't be easier. Google provides you with a copy of their template spreadsheet. When you click the link, you're prompted to click on another link reading: "Yes, make a copy." Doing so copies the template file over to your own Google Docs account where you'll see a basic spreadsheet that features columns for title, content, price, quantity, shipping, image_link, option, and option_name. So you'll know what those fields are used for, the spreadsheet also includes some example inventory entries. When you're finished listing your inventory, you simply publish the spreadsheet as a web page.

The final step is to pick the embed location, a list which allows you to choose between a normal HTML web site or one of the following Google-owned properties: Google Sites, Blogger, or iGoogle. Then you choose the size of your gadget and make a couple of changes to the code, one of which is pasting in the URL to your own Google Docs spreadsheet.

The Checkout Gadget is still a Google Labs project, meaning (in theory) that it's still in the experimental phase. Of course, with Google, the same company that left Gmail in beta until just this year, it's hard to know exactly how "experimental" the gadget really is at this point.

Google Checkout Gadget is "Good Enough"

At the end of the day, PayPal may offer more options for configuring web site buttons as they allow you to configure shipping by weight, various tax calculations, and a customized button appearance among other things. Still, Google Checkout is doing what Google knows best how to do: provide a simple, easy-to-use service to attract the set of users looking for "good enough" (but not the best). As with many of their other services - like Google Docs and Google Sites, for example - Google's offerings may not be the absolute best in their field, but they're good enough for most users. For example, with Google Docs: to date, Microsoft Office still has more features than Docs and Zoho is by far a more robust online suite, but Docs is straightforward and simple. The same can be said for the new Checkout gadget. It may not be the best, but for small business sellers who don't need complicated setups, the gadget will likely be a good fit.

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).

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:

Download MP3

Image credit: Fosforix

I'm not a big shopper but I have struggled while standing in stores to find product reviews on my phone for tennis racquets, vacuum cleaners and power tools within recent memory. Natural search results and Amazon listings only worked so well. Unfortunately, a lot of shopping searches I tried this morning didn't have Product Search results. When they are available, they are pretty good though.

The best thing about the new inclusion of Google Product Search may be its availability in Google Voice search as well. That's handy, or hands-free as the case may be.

Google Product Search is the new name, as of two years ago, for what used to be called Froogle. That product never gained much traction, but speaking as a likely user of this new feature - I hope it continues to improve.

These problems were only compounded during the last year, as eBay also lost a lot of its casual sellers to Craigslist (which saw its traffic rise 40% over the past year).

As Compete's Matt Pace rightly points out, eBay's strategy of emphasizing fixed-price transactions only muddled the waters and blurred eBay's distinction from other online retailers, including eBay's own shopping.com. Also, users clearly prefer to buy from a trusted source like Amazon, and the average order value on eBay has remained stable at around $28 for the last year.

That doesn't mean that eBay's focus on "Buy-It-Now" transactions was a total failure, though. The number of these transactions grew steadily over the last year (up 20% from last year), but this was not enough to make up for the simultaneous decline in eBay's auction business. According to Compete, 1.5 million fewer users actually placed bids on eBay in February 2009 than a year ago.

Online Retailers Profited from Bad Weather

In terms of profits and revenue, there is some good reason to be positive as well, however. According to ComScore, U.S. consumers spent almost twice the amount of money online during the last weekend before Christmas compared to last year. Besides the general trend towards online shopping we have seen over the last few years, some of these gains were probably also due to the severe snowstorms all around the country that prevented shoppers from even getting to the mall.

Some Bad News

Online shopping, however, remains one of the few bright spots in this depressed economy. According to MasterCard, compared to last year, overall retail sales fell by 2.5 in November and 4% in December through Christmas Eve.

Some More Data from Amazon

In lieu of providing us with any meaningful information about its revenue, Amazon decided to offer a number of quirky facts about its success this year. Here are some of the most interesting numbers:

• On the peak day this season, Amazon's worldwide fulfillment network shipped over 5.6 million units.
• During the period from Nov. 15 - Dec. 10, Amazon sold one copy of Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 every 2.5 minutes.
• Amazon Grocery sold enough coffee to give each resident of the highly caffeinated city of Seattle a cup per day for two months.
• Top sellers in consumer electronics included Samsung's 52-inch 1080p 120Hz LCD HDTV with RED Touch of Color, the Apple iPod touch 8 GB (2nd  Generation) and the Acer Aspire One 8.9-inch netbook (1.6 GHz Intel Atom N270 processor, 1 GB RAM, 160 GB hard drive, XP Home, 6 cell battery), sapphire blue.
• The weight of all GPS devices sold from Black Friday through December equals the combined weight of 151 Mini Coopers.

It is important to point out, however, that not every site is doing so well. Just yesterday, Compete listed some of the biggest winners and losers among online retailers during the first two weeks of December. While the online photo service Snapfish, for example, saw its business grow by 57%, its competitor Shutterfly saw its traffic decline slightly by -1% (though chances are that Oprah effect played a significant role here as well). Abercrombie.com lost over 23%, Blockbuster 22%, and 123inkjets.com 86%. The popular online electronics retailer Newegg.com, on the other hand, saw its traffic grow by almost 100%.

While a lot of daily traffic itself doesn't necessarily translate into great sales, Compete's data fits in well with a recent report from CitiGroup (pdf), which reported a healthy growth at Amazon and Buy.com in December 1-15 sales, though this growth was mostly driven by advertising and aggressive discounting. JupiterResearch also came to a similar conclusion earlier this month.

We will have to wait until the end of the holiday shopping season to draw any final conclusions from this data (especially with regards to actual sales), but so far, it looks like at least the larger online retailers might be bucking the overall economic trends.

Still, let's face it, playing what are essentially online computer games where the "fun" is in interacting with random strangers may have been an interesting experiment, but now that the hype has died down, we can see that they only attract a niche crowd. These worlds will not deliver the promise of the 3D web that we had once imagined they would.

Where 3D is Useful: Mapping

When 3D technology is implemented for more practical purposes, though, it can be incredibly useful. Some of the most innovative developments in 3D technology involve advances made in mapping. The newly redesigned Google Maps' Street View is a great example of this. Their recent update lets you drag a figure (the "Pegman") over any street to get a preview of Street View for that location. When the Pegman lands, the whole map turns into a Street View viewer. Google Maps with Street View has also been delivered to our mobile devices where it helps us navigate unknown areas of our world when we're away from our computers.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has also integrated 3D into their mapping platform, only in a different way. They launched their Live Labs project Photosynth in August, which lets you stitch together photos to create detailed 3D environments. Last month, they integrated Photosynth with Live Maps, letting you explore various landmarks and cities in 3D as well as share your own "synthed" photo collections with the other users of Live Maps.

Where 3D is Cool: Browsing

Also this year, we've seen some developments in the use of 3D to deliver better visual browsing experiences. Amazon launched their 3D Winodwshop site which lets you virtually browse through the company's top products.

We've also seen other web applications integrate this 3D visual browsing technology including ManagedQ's semantic Google-based search, Photo Stream's visual newsroom as well as newer search engines like Viewzi and SearchMe. Although none of those have hit the mainstream, they all are interesting experiments.

However, one of our favorite 3D browsing tools is the technology from Cooliris, a browser plugin that lets you transform the web into an immersive 3D experience. With Cooliris, you can surf a "wall of content" from sources like Google, Flickr, Yahoo, SmugMug, and DeviantArt. In October, the company also launched an iPhone application that does the same.

Similar to Cooliris's iPhone app, Microsoft took Seadragon, the technology that supports Photosynth, and released it as an iPhone application callled Seadragon Mobile. With this mobile app, you can browse several image collections including the Library of Congress maps from the TED demo, NASA images, a two-billion by two-billion pixel map of the world, and you can also load custom content via an RSS feed.

3D's Future: Shopping?

As The Guardian reports today, there are many people who think that online shopping is the next frontier for the 3D web. In particular, they make mention of a company called ExitReality, who is developing a 3D plugin that can transform any 2D web site into 3D. Visitors using ExitReality's plugin can change into avatars to wander through web sites and chat with other users. Says ExitReality founder Danny Stefanic, who has been working with virtual reality since 1994, "it's not a replacement for viewing the 2D page - that is still the best way to consume that content - but it gives everyone a 3D space that they can utilize if they want to. And what we have found is that instead of the two- or three-minute session times of 2D websites, when we are in 3D and exploring and chatting to people with similar interests, we spend 20 to 30 minutes there." He notes that sites implementing 3D could offer online sales agents that could chat to visitors or demonstrate products.

In other words, 3D for marketing and sales. Sigh.

Is There Nothing Else?

Last year, we had once wondered if 3D interfaces were useful or just a novelty. We think the jury is still out on that. Besides mapping of course (which extends to new developments in Google Earth, too), the majority of the 3D launches we've seen over the year are fun...even cool...but not incredibly life-changing. In fact, the newest uses of 3D are even more kitschy and even less useful than those that we saw earlier this year. The most recent 3D sites actually backtrack to 3D's beginnings and require you to break out your nerdy red-and-blue glasses to view them. For example, a site called Snowdin.com, is a new holiday Flash production by Colle+McVoy that's entirely in 3D.

For even more mindless fun, we just discovered that you can create your own red-and-blue doodles at the new Neave Anaglyph site.

Sure, we may have rushed out to the car to retrieve our glasses left over from the weekend showing of "Bolt 3D" to view these sites, but we don't imagine that 3D glasses will ever become the new must-have accessory for internet surfing. So where does that leave 3D technology for consumers browsing the web? Fun, games, and virtual worlds? Yes, that seems about right. Although some businesses will find 3D technology useful as we noted before, we did not see this technology become the most ground-breaking innovation of 2008...unless you count the pinching and zooming that took place on our iPhones.

Image credit: 3D images above courtesy of Adverlab; main image: ny3d

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).

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 search 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 women friends use. He also mentioned that he buys a lot of things from iTunes.

One of my favorite sites of the moment is a new social wishlist 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

We have a two-part post summarizing the highlights from the show. In this post we discuss why and how shopping 2.0 sites are targeting very niche customers and how that's helped them increase revenues.

We had 4 diverse 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).

One of the questions we asked the guests was about the type of audience that their websites attract. I theorized that their companies might reach a wider, more mainstream audience than a lot of the web apps we write about on ReadWriteWeb (Twitter, FriendFeed and the like). However, it turned out that all of the guests viewed themselves as targeting very narrow niches.

Niche Audience Leads to More Detail About Your Users

Eric Koger, CEO of niche clothing retailer ModCloth responded that "the power of ModCloth is that we're not hitting a broad audience, but we're focusing in on a customer with a specific lifestyle" - in their case a specific type of women who buys vintage clothing. Koger explained that having a specific niche audience allows ModCloth to target customers on specific platforms - e.g. perhaps they are on Facebook and these are their interests, and they're on these blogs and looking at these websites. Having this level of detail allows them to "build lifetime value" for their customers and enables them to reach out to them in very targeted ways.

Koger said that "there are a lot of tools on the Internet to tell you where users are going, so if you can hone in on a specific target [audience], then there are ways to follow them across the Internet, understand their habits and really reach out to them where they are and where they're spending their time online".

Know & Support Your Users

Jack Jia, founder and CEO of Baynote, followed up by saying that they have close to 200 websites which they power, and a lot of them are e-commerce. What they've found is that for websites to increase revenue and other site success indicators, site owners have to "get the invisible users of your site working together" - in other words have your audience form community. This makes the site much more sticky.

Kurt Collins, VP of Business Development of Cartfly, agreed and said that they are "hyper-focused on merchants", who are in turn hyper-focused on their own niches. Those merchants "know who to approach, but not necessarily how to approach them". So that is where Cartfly comes in, helping them with sales and marketing. He mentioned that niche music and indie bands accounts for a good portion of their merchants and sales. He said "the mainstream stuff hasn't been doing that well for us, in general, but the long tail stuff has been doing great".

Andrew Eisner, Director of Community and Content, Retrevo, said that the key is to strike the right balance between content and commerce. On Retrevo they have reviews and supporting content, so that their users can be assured they're buying the right product.

Coming up tomorrow, in the second part of our podcast wrapup: How E-commerce Vendors Can Transition to The Social Web. In the meantime you can listen to the entire RWW Live podcast below:

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Image: Giorgio Montersino