Monday, May 7, 2012

Online Shopping, Marketing & App Ideas

Perhaps all of us have fallen for it !


I think online shopping is great if we want to explore more opportunities, compare various vendors, get the best price and see lot of variety without getting up from our couches. All in the comfort of our own home.

The only disadvantage is not able to try it on own to check the size & fit, so it works better if we are aware of the right sizes for the options like clothes & shoes. We also miss out on the ambience, learning trends by observing crowds, having a coffee or burger while shopping at our favorite shopping mall.

So maybe online retail should start suggesting what others bought to complete the ensemble or even send home a free coffee or burger ! :) 

So I prefer to buy earrings online & now I even have a collection of silver earrings which I bought online.

I have observed that I get routed to the online shopping sites by the beautiful stunning displays they put through sponsor ads on facebook. So, maybe that makes me a shopper who gets enticed to buy in the online retail world by the window displays.

Earlier I used to have a preference for a specific online retail site which used to send colorful banners for beautiful stuff in my email inbox daily. When they replaced it by discount offers, they sort of lost me as a customer. In this online retail world, it has also been observed that some sites first raise the prices more than the list price and then show an artificial discount.

A Point to Note for online marketers: "Beautiful Stuff Ads work better than the discount offers". Maybe they should combine them both together. Pinterest is a great social collaboration website which focuses on enabling people to share beautiful pics of interesting stuff online.

Then there's another ongoing marketing mode where they offer discount coupons, I think that this idea works too where the buyer ends up believing that they have landed up a more genuine discount, as the discount coupons work uni-formally across all purchases.

Online shopping works great for books too, as demonstrated by amazon so well. Another upcoming idea  practiced for long by online marketing is the ability to predict your references on the basis of your old purchases, thus making the experience pleasant for the buyer as well as for the seller.

I would really love the idea of an online app who knows all my preferences & makes suggestions for my e-book reading, tech news reading automatically. Think of a juke-box which automatically prepares a playlist for you. In future, a juke-box which picks up on your mood based on the selections which you make and then automatically populate the play-list with those type of songs. So, if today I am in a mood for soulful 

I would love to write that app and sell it, or as I act lazy, I would prefer someone else to innovate, develop it already and shower it on us for free. Maybe the upcoming world of predictive analytics will take us there very soon.

It's expected that very soon traffic apps will appear who will study weather and divert traffic accordingly & send warnings to the people. I heard of an app which sees your location online, shares your location with a taxi agency & buzzes a taxi to you in no time.

Maybe 10 years ago, there were no cellphones, we weren't using GPS. As, they say, the opportunities to innovate and keep on improving human life are endless & all the hottest technologies available now will keep on getting utilized to serve us better.

And all our new ideas, which are now getting churned real fast, because of mobile phones, mobile OS, ease of starting a start-up are accelerating this idea - to - application machine. And believe it or not, we humans do end up doing all these things for the "Common Good". 


As for the parting note, a Digressing observation below:

As the guys in "Roxbury Guys" movie say while bobbing their heads in unison:

"What is love ?" : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2h4PhgobI8

The answer can come from a quote from the movie Wedding Crashers: 

"True Love is a Soul's recognition of its counterpart in Another."

And I like Rachel McAdams so much that I am right now watching "Wedding Crashers" movie on TV just to watch her. For a better movie of hers, watch "Notebook" or "Mean Girls" or "Time Traveler's wife" or even "Morning Glory".