The future of shopping online?

I’ve been wanting to write something about ‘Social Shopping’ for a while but never had any specific examples I could share with you until now.

Firstly, what do I mean when I say ‘Social Shopping’.

This is in fact a term used for many things; the power of crowds to rate and review as in Crowdstorm; the ability to add items from any website to a centralised wish list as in List Ideas and Kaboodle; and now we’ll add into the mix: the ability to quite literally shop with a friend on line!

Intrigued? I was when I first heard what Vans were doing. So the site works like any other hyper flash ecommerce store for a funky shoe brand but this has a small difference.  If you select the custom show option, you’re taken to a microsite, which asks you to select the base shoe etc. Once you get the customisation part, you’re invited to ‘Chat with Your Friends’. This takes the form of a pop-up box where you select if you want to email them a link or chat via AIM.

Once you actually manage to do this, you’ll both basically be seeing the same screen at the same time so in theory, when I pick fandango pink as the base colour, my very good friend who can see my every move would stop me and say perhaps I should select something slightly more manly, like the ‘swirly hearts’ pattern…well, that’s what friends are for.

The truth is, I really love the concept and I’ve been wanting to implement something like this for a while, but budget and tech had never allowed for the opportunity. In reality, I only managed to get the Vans site to work for me just the once. Perhaps it was because I was on a Mac, or all the friends I attempted this with were luddites, but I’m sure that for the target audience, this would be just one of a multiple of chat interfaces that they would be operating at any one time whilst finishing that GCSE project and nailing the last level on Grad Theft Auto 12.

It doesn’t stop there. A couple of weeks back, Coast (high street occasional wear for women) re-launched their newly designed website with a new feature within the Fitting Room section called ‘Group Shop’.

This has similar functionality to the Vans site however it requires more planning as you have to invite friends to a pre-agreed time slot whereupon everyone clicks on their click and hey, you have Sex in the City right there on your laptop!

So there you have it. Social Shopping is finally here - ish. I’m not entirely sold on either website’s social shopping functionality or their reliability, but hats off to them for giving it a go. Will it have mass appear? We’ll have to wait and see.

Let me know if you’ve come across anything similar during your web travels.

Is digital in the USA more advanced than the UK?

Just back from a trip stateside (bimonthly visit to our New York office) and while crunched up in my economy seat I began to ponder over the transfer of skills between the US and UK, which has always been a hot topic for me. While reflecting on the debate about whether the two markets were ready to benefit from each other’s styles, particularly within e-commerce I concluded that the big difference is that Americans generally think differently and expect a different type of advertising and marketing to Europeans and this is apparent in their respective approaches to digital. The most obvious driver for this is the sheer size and disparate nature of America, which goes some way to explaining the brash nature – at least by European standards – of their marketing style.

This difference in styles - the real difference in terms of skills, is that the US suffers from a shortage of what I believe is good creative talent whereas the UK has fewer outstanding digital strategists, marketers, optimisers, researchers or analysts. It is common knowledge that the US is at least a year or so ahead in these areas and much more advanced in techniques such as multi-variant testing, data analytics, information mining and ECRM – all things your average ecommerce marketing director barely implements in the UK.

On top of this, Americans in general have a much more “online” mentality, they are far more plugged in to technology and proud of it, and this tends to be reflected in the fact that their technical development skill sets are much more advanced than ours. Many of the cutting-edge concepts like Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 were born in the US. Indeed the current thought is that the future of the web will be about apps living online, and the US is way ahead in this area. Their skills base (in terms of creating user interfaces that cross from desktop to online and working in environments such as Adobe Air & Flex) are beyond anything we are producing in Europe.

I think it’s time to admit that we can learn a lot from our cousins Stateside (and vice versa), specifically within the ecommerce arena, and start pooling our resources. Now’s not the time for being coy.