Next Generation Shopping

I was just reading over on the E-Commerce Optimization blog about Pronto’s latest social shopping site launch. This not truly new news as it had been written up last month on Mashable, but this was the first time the official word came from Pronto. Let me first say I think they did a good job in integrating some of the community features. Unfortunately, I found something very bothersome before I even reached their site. E-Commerce Optimization had the screen capture shown below:

$45,000 to anyone who can identify what is wrong with the listing above… See it yet? I found myself wondering if the person who took this screen capture was paying attention to the listing. A Rushmore DVD for $45,000? Um, I’m not really sure that price is accurate! I figured it was just a fluke in Pronto’s pricing system. Flukes are still very common in price comparison engines. I’ve seen plenty on the others (Shopping.com, PriceGrabber, etc.). However I’ve never seen one so extreme.

When I clicked “compare prices” I was taken to the product page. There I noticed a “most liked” section to the right of the main product information. I thought “Hey, this is a cool little tidbit.” Then I got to thinking that the information “Marie C. from Boulder, Colorado was the first person to like it” wasn’t all that useful to me. But hey it’s a good start as far as social shopping goes…

Now, I’m not a big Pronto user, but I found it disturbing that again the pricing information seemed skewed. Office Space DVD from $3 to $529? I did some further digging. The low price ($3) was from GreatArrow.com. Never heard of them, but I checked it out anyway. They sell Greeting Cards, no DVDs found on their site. I checked the high price ($529). Turned out to be Office Space by Creatas (Software) from FotoSearch.com. Ugh, that was enough for me.

Ok, enough criticism about the price and product matching. Pronto did some quality community integration work. I saw some similarities to our own My Shopping Facebook application, specifically the short review box, and the “I own it” and “I want it” parts, found in the modal popup that appears when clicking the “Like” button. This makes it easy to share additional information.

I found their Local Liked Products section to be a very innovative idea, and something they could build on in the long-term. As described by Pronto:

“Users can track the hottest trends in their city by searching the most “Liked” products by region.”

Another very important “social shopping” piece that they have included are the Brand and Store Likes:

“Users can express their interest in particular brands and stores in addition to their favorite products, providing other shoppers greater insight into their tastes and style.”

They seem to be off to a great start in the social shopping space. For more information, Scott Wingo has a pair of writeups (Part I / Part II) including Q&A and some tips… worth the read. You can read the official press release here.

Our official press release for our new Facebook application went out just last Friday. Since then the application has been gaining attention from bloggers around the globe (including France and Japan). Coverage ranged from popular social media news blogs like Mashable to the shopping industry’s own InternetRetailer magazine.

Shannon from Varien provided a nice review. I figured I’d respond to her question directly here. In her review she refers to the shopping news feed (found on our application’s entrance page) and asks,

“How do I filter out all of these other users?”

Great question! As time goes on and we see more “networks of friends” versus individual users, we’ll add filtering features.

She also states

“In the end, I came away wishing more Facebook application developers had given their offerings this much thought and care.”

That means a great deal to me personally.

Next up… I’ve talked about viral expansion a lot recently. Here is what I am talking about. A continued uptrend of % of change in users. A picture is worth a thousand words right? The graphic below looks at the growth rates of our application and that of the eBay Shopping app as well (since last Friday, July 20th). While the eBay Shopping app has been around longer and has more users, our app is growing at a rapid pace.

I’ve recently spent some time putting together a social shopping solution for Facebook users. I wanted it to cover a wide range of products and categories, so I choose to use Shopping.com as my data partner. They have a very extensive product database and a good search engine. Also, this will allow me to integrate the application into our website SecretPrices.com going forward if I should choose to.

As always I’ve created my application on Microsoft’s ASP.NET. I’m still preaching the Microsoft word, even after returning from the second NYC Developers hackathon which was about 99% guys with Macbooks and programming in PHP, Ruby or even Java. Yeah, I was that 1%. However, the guys from ClipMarks came eventually and were developing on ASP.NET (but- .NET 1.1). At any rate, you can develop your own Facebook solution with whatever language you wish. Without getting too technical, here are the basics for ASP.NET developers:

1) Get an application key on Facebook, if you don’t already have one. See developers.facebook.com.

2) Goto CodePlex and download the latest (v 1.2) of the Facebook Developers Toolkit by Microsoft. Note: Requires .NET 2.0. Optionally, there are a few other open-source ASP.NET development frameworks including this one.

Next, Load it up and read the Facebook Developer resources. Read the ASP.NET and other tutorials. Hit up the developer discussion boards as well. There is a lot of information. If you are encountering a problem with the Facebook platform, the answer is probably out there somewhere. If you know what IRC is, you might be able to hop on and get some instant answers or feedback in the #facebook channel on irc.freenode.net.

3) Creating A Page – Be sure to assign the your developer key and secret key with every page load, as you’ll need it before you call the Facebook API

_fbService.ApplicationKey = “YOUR_APPLICATION_KEY”

_fbService.Secret = “YOUR_SECRET_KEY”

Read more »

With all the hype about social shopping, Facebook, Shopping 3.0 (what?), etc. we couldn’t stand to be left out. Today we released our own social shopping application on the Facebook platform dubbed “My Shopping”. The application was released via SecretPrices.com with plans of integrating portions of the functionality in the future.

The application allows users to shop online with their Facebook friends. Anyone can search for books, music, movies, gadgets, clothing, or anything you have a need for. They can then rate, mark, and share items. For any item a user can view how many of their friends like or dislike that item, as well as compare the lowest prices available from retail stores.

View www.secretprices.com/myshopping for the full details or read the official press release on Yahoo! News.

You may also notice that SecretPrices.com has a new look and some new features. We’ll be getting to that news shortly as well.

This week was my first time attending the largely popular AD:Tech conference. This year the conference had over ten-thousand attendees. While there was a ton going on at the conference, I’ll try to stick to mainly E-Commerce related topics for this post.

Two sessions really grabbed my attention. The first was titled Social Commerce: Mashing up the Web. The session boasted to be pertaining to the coming of sites after MySpace, YouTube, etc. From the description: Extending the “core elements of online social networks into more direct commercial models”. Sounded very interesting to me, but the headline title had given me a totally different first impression. My first piece of advice to the conference organizers is to be careful with the “new-age lingo” you use. Web 2.0 lingo is not strictly defined and often has vague or multiple meanings. Buzzwords are great to grab attention, but should be used carefully.

Getting to the point… You notice the titled included “mashup”. I realize this is not a developers’ conference, but when I think of mashup I think of web service integration (see mashupcamp.com or ProgrammableWeb for more information). I could tell by the list of speakers that they most likely wouldn’t mention anything about web services / APIs.

Finally… The session turned out to be very informational (but unrelated to mashups). Each panelist basically gave a marketing overview on how to reach a specific target audience and allow them to engage. Nath Freitas of Cruxy made some of the most interesting points, one of which was noted on the ADTech Blog yesterday:

“Most social sites lean heavily on the audience to build the content and evangelize. To do this, he emphasizes exposing consumers to a deeper amount of content to encourage additional engagement.”

The topic of engagement is a very important one for “social commerce”. You should not push too much content OR too much commerce in the face of your target audience. Providing a platform for the correct mixture of focused content and relevant commerce is key.

The second session was title Next Generation Strategies for E-Commerce. This was probably the most useful session I listened in on. The sessions started with some statisics compliments of JupiterResearch. Here is what I noted:

• Forecast for online shopping (2006) = $95 Billion
• Forecast for online shopping (2010) = $144 Billion
• Holiday sales (2006) are predicted to increase 18% = $32 Billion
• 50% of all transactions are influenced by online commerce

Heather Dougherty of Nielsen/NetRaings was asked what key trend stuck out in her mind. She was quick to mention the ability for users to socially “tag” shopping or product pages. She hit the nail on the head, but was at a lose for words on a term for this new phenomenon. Basically, “wishlists on steroids” she said. Some examples she mentioned were Kaboodle, Stylehive and Delicious. Let me try to put a term to that, “social bookmarking”. The trend with sites like Kaboodle, Wists and some others seem to be more of “social product lists” where users share lists of products with friends, family or the entire Internet userbase. It extends upon the old-fashioned (web 1.0 if you will) “wishlist”. I’m surprised nothing like this was brought up during the social commerce session.

Another striking fact was that having a Verisign logo on their homepage increased Audible.com purchased by 98%. That is a crazy increase, but don’t go running to add a Verisign logo to your site just yet. It is all relevant to your target audience and the product you are selling. So just focus on the moral of the presentation: Trial and error testing is critical. Let me put it this way, if you don’t try it and track comparable conversions, you won’t know what your users are most interested in.

Technorati Tags: social shopping, social commerce, adtech, ad:tech, kaboodle, stylehive, e-commerce, myspace, social bookmarking, advertising

Today the much anticipated Crowdstorm social shopping site launched the beta of its website to the public.
Here is the email they sent out to the private beta users:

“Today we have officially launched the “beta” version of the site and made it open to the public. This means we are finally open for business and keen on building our Crowdstorm community over the coming months.

We’ve had some amazing feedback and lots of improvement suggestions which we’re ploughing through right now. Over the last few weeks we’ve also added a couple of new features such as:

“activity tracker”: from your main home page, you can now see the latest events (recommendations, blogs, comments..) that have been happening across the site from everyone and also just from your friends.

“talk”: create and participate in conversations on anything shopping or technology related using the new talk menu tab.

“send to a friend”: if you’re looking at any product that you think your friends might like then now you can quickly send it to them with a simple click.

Hopefully see you again soon on Crowdstorm.com.”

More Crowdstorm coverage on the Mashable blog… Crowdstorm also has a blog of their own. Well go check it out already!

Technorati Tags: Crowdstorm, Crowdstorm.com, Crowdstorm beta, social shopping, social online shopping, kelkoo

My previous post of The Next Generation of Deal Sites shared my vision for a model for future deal sites as a shopping comparison hybrid. This follow-up is another interesting concept. A deal aggregator. The one that first comes to my mind is ClipFire, which launched the beginning of this year. It essentially works by aggregating RSS feeds from a variety of different deal sites, and pushing the information into a searchable database. The social part comes into play as users are allowed to vote (or “clip”) their favorite deals and tag them.

Kevin Carey is the creator of this ClipFire service, but some are curious of how he can swing a profit from it. On a TechCrunch post from earlier this year Michael Arrington reviewed the service, and several readers posted some interesting comments regarding the issue of the site generating revenues. One that caught my attention was an idea to manipulate the RSS changing the affiliate IDs 50% of the time. Aside from being an issue of morals, and the pains involved in doing that, it that basically throws the whole point of the community site out the window. Pete Cashmore, of the Mashable.com blog, believes a better approach would have been to split revenue with users and let them post the deals. His review of the ClipFire service, which calls it Digg for Deals, is a skeptical one. Pete I agree with you on the point of perhaps filling up with spam in the future, but only if the site becomes very popular! And what isn’t filling with spam these days?

At this point the site itself seems to be doing fairly well, but I haven’t really heard much buzz about it recently. It has seemed to follow the inevitable trend of “mashups” to have a large traffic spike and then seem to bottom-out after the initial buzz has passed. Check out the Alexa graph below:

As far as the service itself goes, a suggestion I would have Kevin consider is perhaps trying to utilize regular expressions to draw out the expiration date. I’ve used ClipFire myself several times, but on more than one occasion expired information shows up at the top. Stowe Boyd picked up on another problem that didn’t really cross my mind… The issue of different currencies. Stowe states:

“I already noticed one problem: costs of various products are not normalized to the end users currency. I saw deals for London hotel stays provided in pounds, for example. And the cost of goods are embedded in the text associated with the deal, not pulled out as a primary attribute. There is as a result no way to sort by price, which seems an obvious thing to do.”

While making the results sortable by price is definitely not as easy as it sounds, it might be a good idea to determine prior to aggregation what country the feed is coming from. The problem lies within the fact that the deal information is not in a structured format, thus you can’t easily determine the price, just as you can’t easily determine the expiration date. Perhaps it is time for a “deals” microformat!

Technorati Tags: deals, clipfire, social search, social shopping, community commerce, digg, microformats

I came across a couple posts that pose the questioning the state of the e-commerce mashup industry. One post at WebApiTracker.com and another by Charles Hudson on his blog post Where are all the E-Commerce Mashups?

Charles states:

But what I have been wondering for awhile now is why all of the energy focused on creating content or mapping mashups hasn’t spilled over to e-commerce.

It is good to see people interested in this field and that they see its potential as well. Hopefully, I’ll get some quality feedback and ideas to integrate into SecretPrices.com.

Technorati Tags: E-Commerce, Web 2.0, Mashups

Attending Affiliate Summit last month I got to hear Jeff Barr speak about Amazon’s newest web service technologies. One that was particularly interesting was the Mechanical Turk web service. Mechanical Turk is “artificial artificial intelligence”… It allows users to complete simple tasks that people do better than computers. For example, identifying objects in pictures, translating text, or even answering simple questions.

A recent post to the AWS Blog tells about a new web site that offers the service of asking questions.

Have you ever needed to get an answer to a question in a hurry, perhaps something that you can’t find in your favorite search engine? If so, you may want to tap into the internet-scale Mechanical Turk workforce using the new question asking system at Ask For Cents.

The premise is you pay people pennies, nickels or dimes to answer any questions you have. The issue is the quality of the answers you get back. Currently, the site is in Alpha testing and submitting questions is free… So try it out.

I had talked to Jeff Barr briefly at the Affiliate Summit about a similiar idea and he mentioned he thought someone was working on it. I assume he meant this. So I tested it out from a shopping perspective. I asked three questions, each receiving two answers from the site. The results were very quick (within 5-10 minutes). The first two questions were pricing based questions and the third question was more of a research question.

Question #1 sent Tue, 14 Feb 2006 06:59:01 +0200
Which online web site has the Kenneth Cole KC3500 Wrist Watch for the cheapest price?

Answer 1 received Tue, 14 Feb 2006 07:03:01 +0200
Ashford.com Link

Answer 2 recieved Tue, 14 Feb 2006 07:03:21 +0200
amazon has 2 sellers

WorldofWatches
Diamond.com
both are 131.00

Critique
These answers are both good, but could be better. The real answer is Ashford.com, which was Answer #1. But they also have a coupon right now for 20% off or a different coupon for 10% off and free shipping.

Question #2 sent Tue, 14 Feb 2006 08:19:05 +0200
What web site has the lowest price on the Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Sound Card for a notebook computer? Is there any coupon or rebate for it?

Answer 1 received Tue, 14 Feb 2006 08:22:15 +0200
SuperWarehouse.com Link
$30 rebate

Answer 2 received Tue, 14 Feb 2006 08:29:04 +0200
http://www.directron.com/audigy2zsnb.html

Directron has it for $85.99 with a $30 mail in rebate. The rebate form
is at the bottom of the site listed above

Critique
Good answers, but again not the best. This was actually a deal posted on xpBargains.com from Radioshack for $90 - $40 rebate is $50 shipped. The Directron is cheaper, but before shipping costs.

Question #3 sent Tue, 14 Feb 2006 08:42:55 +0200
Where can I buy a remote shutter for panansonic lumix fz30?

Answer 1 recieved Tue, 14 Feb 2006 08:45:18 +0200
PartStore.com Link

Answer 2 recieved Tue, 14 Feb 2006 08:48:59 +0200
Try here:
Bhphotovideo.com Link

Critique
Both answers were incorrect! Didn’t match what the question was. I took the question from a Yahoo! Answers post which was currently waiting for answers. The research question yieled the worst results… fitting it was the most complex question.

My initial thoughts for using mechanical turk was finding some way to integrate it into shopping or shopping comparison sites. Maybe let users ask questions and rather than waiting for a shopping community to respond, receive answers quickly.

Or how about from a mobile device? Asking a product question while in the store and receiving an answer back in 5 minutes… Hmm. Contact me with business proposals

Technorati Tags: mechanical turk, amazon, web services, social shopping, answers

Important is the social aspect to shopping, especially for the female gender.  We’ve seen social networking sites become huge… Myspace and Facebook are amongst the two most popular that I have actually used.  But what about adding shopping to that.  Well thats the business plan for Yub.com, which was produced/bought by Buy.com.  Pete Cashmore calls it the “MySpace for Shopping” in a recent blog post on his Mashable site.  For a community incentive to particpate there is even a revenue sharing model.  You share your thoughts on products, etc and people can “Buy though you”- thats where you would get some of the revenue.  Overall, an interesting concept, however, they only list a set of stores, and set it up as a virtual mall (which is a fitting idea, you can even browse in 3d).   Although the list of stores is growning, there are still many more e-tailers out there not listed.

What if you combine social shopping and comparison shopping… And throw revenue sharing in there too?  Feel free to Contact us or leave a comment on this if you are interested in working on a web 2.0 project with this concept.

Technorati Tags: social networking, community, virtual mall, comparison shopping, revenue sharing, web 2.0