Many – particularly moms – manage to shoehorn 27 hours of activities into the standard 24-hour day.² It should come as no surprise, then, that 40% shop online during work hours.  They are buying everything from clothes and books for their family to more considered purchases like electronics and home furnishings.

Given the focus on social for online retail, I guess it will be only a matter of minutes before these women ask you to make it easier for them to connect and collaborate with their spouses, friends, family, etc. in real-time while they are on their lunch break trying to buy that new dining room table or new school shoes for her finicky teenager??

Sources:

1 “The New Female Consumer: The Rise of the RealMom.” Advertising Age, November 2009. 2 “Living La Vida Rapida.” AOL/OMD Global Moms Study, July 2008.

As part of the “Recommendations, Reviews, and Ratings” category that Christine includes in the No. 1 spot, we would also add our ShopTogether Crowd application as an example of a real-time recommendations engine. ShopTogether Crowd displays the most popular items on a retailer’s site in a dynamic display, with products moving in and out as the crowd’s favorites change in real time.  ShopTogether Crowd lets customers see what’s popular with other people who shop when they do.

For example, if you think about online shopping in terms of a real-world shopping mall, visitor demographics tend to change during different times of the day, i.e., there may be older customers coming to the store in the morning, office workers visiting during their lunch breaks, and students stopping by in the afternoon when classes are over. As the likes of those different demographics change during the day, ShopTogether Crowd reflects those changes in real-time, giving like-minded visitors new ideas for what to buy and marketers a new look at their customer base.  Here is an example of how this application works via our customer Charlotte Russe’s Facebook fan page.

It looks like the Altimeter Group has a great show lined up for October and it will be interesting to see what other innovations for online retailers they discuss.

1. Viral Marketing: Retailers need to tap into their customers’ social networks to promote products, find new, like-minded customers and generate traffic or buzz around the brand. There are many companies working in this area, with many creative agencies developing smart, integrated campaigns leveraging Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter and the like, while generating new “fans” for brands to reach.
2. Affirmation: Ratings and reviews initially served to give consumers more confidence in a product’s reliability, worthiness or “cool” factor. But until recently, these have mostly been from anonymous reviewers or people unknown by the purchaser. Now though, buyers can get this affirmation directly from the people who matter most in the purchase decision, namely friends, family and peers.  The Facebook “Like” button and commenting/feedback via social networks are examples.
3. Collaboration: Consumers can work together in real time to choose a car, furniture or an outfit.   Also, some companies are promoting group purchasing and/or steep discounts if large numbers of consumers buy within a certain timeframe.  This area stands out because it can lead directly to a purchase. ShopTogether, Groupon are specific examples of collaboration solutions.

Retailers need to address all three of these areas in their social strategy.  ShopTogether’s flexible interface and turn-key products can help retailers address each one of these aspects to create a complete and effective social commerce solution. We would love to hear how you’re viewing the space.

• High shipping costs - 44%
• Not ready to purchase - 41% 
• Price checking - 27%
• Price too high - 25%
• Wanted to save products for later - 24% 

Charlton states that, “Providing clear delivery charges on product pages and elsewhere so that customers don’t have to add items to the cart to find out total costs would be one improvement, and it also makes sense for retailers to make it as easy as possible for customers to resume their sessions on subsequent visits. However, most of the reasons quoted here have something to do with comparison shopping, and except for high shipping costs, there is little that retailers can do.”

There is something retailers can do, however. Implementing a social shopping solution like ShopTogether can go a long way in helping shoppers complete the purchase process. In fact, another report from Forrester’s Sucharita Mulpuru says that co-browsing and co-shopping technologies are “extremely valuable because they can reduce abandonment by confused or frustrated shoppers.”

Online shoppers who can quickly secure necessary buy-in from a second party via technologies like ShopTogether will be less likely to abandon their shopping carts. Giving shoppers the ability to invite a friend to look at their shopping cart during the checkout process can also serve a similar role to providing product reviews or customer testimonials. Having a quick “thumbs up” from a friend will help mitigate concerns a shopper may have with the final purchase decision, and there are reams of data showing that the opinion of a friend can go much farther in influencing them than a third party. Plus, once connected on a retailer’s site with a friend, shoppers will be less likely to jump around to other sites to look for better deals.

In addition to existing customers Mattel, Charlotte Russe, Buy.com and German cosmetics retailer Hautbalance, among others, we’re announcing at the show that we’ve added cosmetics brands Clinique and jane iredale, as well as online costume retailer Costume Craze. Our ShopTogether application is also now iPad compatible, and we’ll be rolling the updates out across our customer base over the coming weeks.

If you’re at the show, come by and say hello, and see how we’re bringing the promise of social shopping to reality with our great roster of customers and partners. For more on the announcement we’re making at IRCE, read our press release.

We believe these percentages will continue to grow as the number of retailers who recognize the importance of peer opinion in the purchase process become educated about the social tools, like ShopTogether, available to them to facilitate peer communication and opinion sharing.

Today, Facebook launched a number of products that echo our belief that, as their CEO Mark Zuckerberg put it, “We’re building towards a web where the default is social. Every application and product will be designed from the ground up to use real identity and friends.”

Two products Facebook announced that aim towards this goal are the social plugins “Like” and “Social Bar.” The Like social plugin allows sites to implement the Facebook “like” button anywhere on their site, so Facebook users can “like” a particular piece of content (e.g., a movie on IMDb, a news story on CNN or a song on Pandora) and broadcast it to their friends. The other plugin, Social Bar, is similar to our ShopTogether toolbar (although without co-browsing capability), and allows users to view their news stream and chat with other Facebook friends on a partner site.

While these tools will enable many sites to quickly create a social community with few development resources, there are a number of big concerns for brands thinking about integrating the Facebook products. According to Jeremiah Owyang, analyst at Altimeter Group:

• “..Beware, by allowing Facebook to be the primary login, this reduces the traditional way of capturing leads and populating your database.  Secondly, by doing this once, you’re setting the promise that Facebook will always be part of our corporate experience.

• …Facebook’s core conundrum is they’ve made the promise to their users to keep the experience private and closed. Expect continued scrutiny over privacy as Facebook struggles to go open to compete with Google, dragging along users to be more public every step of the way.   Facebook’s battles are both external as well as internal.”

In addition to these concerns, sites that implement the Facebook social bar are blocking the ability for users to easily connect to other networks that may share popularity among their customers, including Twitter, MySpace and others.

In spite of these issues, we share Facebook’s vision of the social web and are excited to see how this pushes more companies to take a closer look at collaboration technologies like ours.

For more on Facebook’s news, check out the synopsis from Jeremiah Owyang here.

Salesforce has taken the best of Facebook and Twitter—which have revolutionized our ability to communicate generally—and figured out a way to improve their offerings.  And the early reports from the field are fantastic. In the webinar that Salesforce held yesterday to announce Chatter, an executive from Saatchi & Saatchi in New York raved about the roll-out in their organization and the benefits they saw from the tool. Because we are accustomed to communicating in this way from the social networks, no training is required; sales & service teams fall right into it.  It certainly does seem like a silver bullet, and we are hopeful that the paradigm shift will pay off.

As real-time collaboration continues to build momentum in the various areas of our life, consumers will begin to wonder why they don’t have the same functionality consistently wherever they go on the Web — whether it’s retail stores, real-estate sites or online financial services companies.  Or they will gravitate to those businesses who adopted it early and are becoming known for their collaborative shopping experience.  But don’t take our word for it.  When did you implement ratings and reviews on your website? 

For information on our social commerce solutions, visit our ShopTogether® page or contact us.

DecisionStep’s ShopTogether application is included as an example in the co-browsing/co-shopping category. Forrester finds that 35 percent of retailers are looking to add this functionality in 2010, and calls it out as “… extremely valuable because it can reduce abandonment by confused or frustrated shoppers,” and  that “…applications of this tool to high-value verticals such as appliances or auto could be promising.” Also, “If executed well, this has the ability to drive increased conversion and reduced cart abandonment.”

Also evaluated, product sharing was called out as “one of the most promising social commerce technologies …While the value of social network pages themselves remains questionable, peer-to-peer (P2P) product sharing appears to be more promising. It is currently deployed or was planned for implementation/enhancement in 2009 by 53% of retailers surveyed…Several retailers already report that this functionality has driven more traffic to their site than virtually all other interactive marketing tactics (other than paid search).”

Product sharing can easily be coupled with a collaborative shopping experience in real-time when the users are online together.  You can create an environment of not only sharing, but one that has a friendly and high-functioning experience where a second opinion from a trusted friend comes effortlessly.

As for social recommendations, Forrester found that this technology is “currently employed or was planned for implementation/enhancement in 2009 by 59% of Web retailers.”  Given the mass appeal, choose to implement in a way that keeps your customers engaged with your products and brand—and let them bring their friends into the store too.

It is important that companies optimize their brand in response to this shift. Brian Solis, a prominent author and thought leader in the area of new media, recently published a list of 10 steps for optimizing the brand for social search (below).

For brands in the retail, real estate, financial services, travel and other markets, our ShopTogether application for social commerce can help brands tackle six of the steps (Nos. 1, 2, 5, 6, 7 and the “Bonus” below) that Solis recommends, plus a lot more.

The ShopTogether toolbar modernizes a site by integrating sharing and chat functionality found on the most innovative places on the Web, and allows one-click distribution of a brand’s content to all of the social networks most important to its customers. On top of that, ShopTogether allows real-time interaction on the site itself, keeping friends and other site visitors connected on the page, where they can chat and browse each other’s products, giving them a voice and letting them share opinions that lead to buying decisions.

In addition, data collected anonymously by the ShopTogether Crowd application can be used for broadcasting the hottest items in the store in real-time, displaying those products dynamically on the site itself, or on the company’s Facebook fan page or in banner ads on third party sites, adding a new merchandising element for brands.

Which of the below steps has your company taken to optimize your brand for the way consumers are now getting information? Contact us and let us know.

http://www.briansolis.com/2010/03/optimizing-brands-for-social-search/

10 Steps for Optimizing the Brand for Social Search

1. Modernize and socialize your site to complement the experience visitors expect in 2010

2. Optimize the site and all social objects for traditional, social, and real-time search

3. Create meaningful and personable social profiles where consumers are active today (pay attention to where they will be tomorrow as well)

4. Establish an editorial calendar to produce and distribute relevant content for each and every network with cadence

5. Add social connectivity to the home site to facilitate maximum engagement (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Google, Yahoo) – eradicate proprietary login systems

6. Integrate social sharing functionality at the source of engagement – keep them on the page

7. Enable the social syndication of that content within one step

8. Manually introduce content and social objects to stakeholders and social beacons

9. Create paths that define and engender the experience you desire with destinations and calls to action integrated to close the loop

10. Monitor the activity and find ways to improve the experience and also sharing

Bonus: Give them a voice to make sharing more personal and contextual