Web 2.0 and e-commerce
Amazon.com, Play.com, CDwow.com will all go down in the ecommerce hall of fame as the trailblazers that got the whole thing moving. Traditionally, they’ve been painted as the new economy. They are agile, fluid, not strangled by a massive retail presence. The old economy, meanwhile, is still recoiling from a rapidly changing market, and spends millions on ecommerce sites that just repeat the same old offline mistakes.
But I’m not sure that these trailblazers will win the day. In fact, in terms of web 2.0, they’re decidedly old economy. Amazon et al are really just old economy businesses using the internet as another channel to market.
Because it is a relatively new channel to market, internet marketeers have tended to recommend conventionality in design, so that new customers are not confused in the buying process. This has led to a whole raft of ecommerce sites that imitate Amazon’s processes, even down to the tabs at the top of their sites.
Here are 5 more creative approaches that I read about in SEOmoz daily blog.
The AJAX Overlay
Gap.com’s overlay of a product detail
Generally, I’m not a great fan of whizzy pages that break the browser’s back button and useability guidelines, but showing an overlay of product detail gives Gap.com users the chance to browse more deeply witout committing to a full page change. I guess this would be more akin to a conventional retail experience?
The Colour Selector
‘
Etsy.com’s Color Picker
More creative methods for browsing stock should be reviewed by all ecommerce designers. We spend a lot of time with customers agonising over the customer process flow. Often, we have to make wholesale changes to this process, in the face of actual trading data.
The Customizable Product
Puma.com’s Mongolian Shoe BBQ
This is really unusable, but such a smart concept that it’s worth a look. I like the concept because it moves well beyond conventional retail, and allows the customer to interact with the manufacturer and the design process in quite a unique way.
The Product Blog
Flypaper - Bluefly’s Product Blog
This is another win for blogging. An ecommerce site, where BlueFly blogs its own products. This is taking the customer review concept to its logical concept, and encourages consumers to buy into a lifestyle, that they actively engage in and relate to.
The Embedded Testimonial
PixelGirlShop’s In-Depth Testimonials
Again this is a customer review development; but the testimonials are real people with real passion for the products.
All food for thought; for my money I’d expect product blogging to be a de facto standard within twelve months.
Comments
Leave a Reply