Prominent online retail brands like Mattel, Buy.com and Charlotte Russe, as well as dozens of smaller ones, have begun to embrace social shopping technologies in recent months. Why now?
In a tight retail environment and tough economy, businesses are looking for more ways to deliver a competitive advantage and a strong return. Real-time social shopping technologies cost a fraction of a typical retailer’s marketing budget and only take a couple of days or weeks to deploy. And retailers like Charlotte Russe that are using the technology have seen significant increases in unit lift, average order values and time spent on site, while seeing decreases in returns.
Another reason more retailers are deploying social shopping applications is because consumers are becoming exposed to real-time and near real-time communication on the Web with friends and family through sites like Twitter and Facebook. A telling sign of how far these networking tools have reached came from Facebook, which reported earlier in the year that the fastest growing segment of users was women over the age of 55. Online retailers realize they can now influence word of mouth – which has been shown in study-after-study to be the biggest influence on a consumer’s purchase decision – much more effectively by tapping into these vast networks.
Finally, real-time technologies have received high-profile attention lately thanks to Google. First, the company announced YouTube RealTime in April, which lets people interact on YouTube to see what their friends are watching, see a history of their friends’ recent activities and get notifications in real time when friends perform an activity like adding a comment or a favorite. Then, in May the company announced Google Wave, a real-time communication platform that combines email, instant messaging, wikis, social networking and project management. With the implicit “thumbs up” Google has given to real-time communications, more online businesses, both in the retail and other sectors, will likely begin to adopt these technologies on their site.
Given the clear benefits real-time shopping can deliver, coupled with the current state of the market and adoption of high-profile real-time technologies in other categories, it looks like 2010 will be the year that a whole host of retailers will follow the lead of some of the trailblazers like Mattel, Charlotte Russe and Buy.com.
Tags: e-commerce, e-tail, google wave, real-time, retail, s-commerce, ShopTogether, social shopping, youtube real time