The integration of shopping and social networking features is not a new phenomenon. eBay launched eBay Neighborhoods a few years ago, Hearst acquired social shopping service Kaboodle, and there’s Jellyfish, which was bought by Microsoft. Retailers themselves have half-heartedly embraced social networking as a marketing tool, adding branded Facebook pages, creating profiles on social networks and posting ads.
Interactive online retail marketing agency Fluid Inc. hopes to take this one step further for retailers. Its “Fluid Social” technology allows for retailers to offer a chat feature on their Websites that integrates shoppers’ Facebook Friends and Groups in order to enhance their online shopping experience.
Here’s how it works. If you see an item you like while browsing a retail site, you can request feedback about a product from your friends by pushing information about the product (such as images from clothing, links to products, and movie clips) to your Facebook status update. Under the product image, you are given the option of clicking on a ‘Share on Facebook’ button and are prompted to add the given retailer’s Facebook application. Once added, you can rate the item and ask for feedback via a link back to the product that is published directly into your status update feed.
Your friends’ comments or ratings on the status update can be seen directly on the product’s page on the retailer’s site and are updated in real-time. The app also lets you invite specific Facebook friends to rate the product without publishing to your status update. Of course, throughout the shopping process, you must be logged into Facebook. Fluid’s technology also allows for real-time chat separate from Facebook. This feature lets you send an email to a friend inviting them to join you in a chat about a product. Once the invitee joins, you can openly chat with them via Facebook Chat on the product page of the site.
This implementation is promising for several reasons. For retailers, these peer-to-peer interactions allows for shoppers to never leave their site to get feedback from friends. For shoppers, it lets them see ratings and comments on specific products from friends whose opinions they value and trust. And the real-time chat let’s you get this information instantaneously. Currently, Fluid has enlisted Vans, Lucky Brand Jeans and Warner Entertainment to incorporate Fluid Social.
Collaborative shopping isn’t new—plenty of retail sites offer live chats with store reps, but the ability to do it directly with your friends and Facebook contacts adds a new twist. With the current drought in consumer retail spending, retailers may be looking for other ways to engage consumers. Fluid says it plans to integrate Twitter into its technology in the near future by allowing users to tweet directly from the retail site as well. Heaven help us.
Like anyone’s going to use this.
When will Amazon integrate it? Would Zappos consider it?
What Michael said. I guess I can see preteens designing shoes with their friends while using mommy and daddy’s credit card, but it will get old very fast. Send a picture and be done with it.
Social shopping solution, what about opensocial container?
You first need to get online retailers to install this Facebook button. How many reputable retailers will do this? Few, if any.
seems too complicated to use
Its a cool scenario, and it highlights one of the scenarios enabled by the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit we recently announced.
The one big difference I see is, even when Windows Live Messenger users aren’t on a web site they can be reached. The intersection of your friends who are on a specific website (I.e. Facebook) to chat with is always going to be low.
Luckily the Windows Live Messenger is installed on hundreds of millions of desktops, mobile devices, etc. so people can be reached anywhere.
Isn’t picking up your phone and asking your friend if she likes her Lucky Jeans a bit easier and more social? Or maybe discussing it over coffee? How many opinions about jeans do you really need? My cell phone seems like a godsend compared to some of these social web “solutions”.
OK, sorry for the plug. But I believe this functionality should lie outside of the walls of the site. Moreover, here is an example: http://www.tiseme.com
Brandon – hit me at alogan at microsoft dot com we should chat.
I think the real answer to facebook is http://bit.ly/YHtz
I don’t see this is going to work out. Neither for retailers nor for facebook. I think the real answer to facebook is http://bit.ly/YHtz
Not a real good product. Users can easily just copy/paste URL of product to ppl through a chat window instead of this..
Actually, I’m working on something similar, but these guys ignored what I think could be useful.
Yeah, but you’d need to copy and paste the URL every time you make a change to the design. I think this chat widget allows the customers to share their designs in real-time without having to copy/paste URLs every time. It’s kinda like co-browsing only each person controls their own browser, right?
honestly, i overall wonder about the (positive) impact of social commerce. who has success stories to share? any clues …?
1) It’s way too complicated. I’d rather just copy a link from the retailer’s site and email it to a group of my friends (I do this all the time, btw). This way, I don’t have to sit on a retailer’s site and hope my friends show up, or keep returning to the same site to see if my friends have commented.
2) I don’t want to ask my ENTIRE network for feedback on a pair of shoes. The service should not set this as the default – you should ALWAYS pick from a list of your FB friends.
3) Angus, sounds like MSFT is on the right path, but here’s a dose of reality: I only know 2 people who use Windows Live Messenger. Everyone else uses Google, AIM, or FB chat now. OPEN ur service and you might get somewhere…
4) It’s not a plus that Fluid forces people to stay on retailer sites. Online social interaction has to be portable and go wherever the consumer spends their time.
Not so sure about this for clothing but for electronics might be great: ask others who are hanging around, and friends, family, gear-heads and geeks their opinions on difficult to understand technical options.
Sounds like a lot of you don’t think there’s much application in this. I agree it may have limited utility, but here’s one idea that pops to mind immediately. A recipe site, like allrecipes.com or epicurious.com, or a drink recipe site. If you are planning a party with your friends, you can share a recipe with them and get immediate feedback. There are other scenarios I think could be useful — picking out flowers for mothers day with all 5 of your siblings, picking out a baby gift as a group of friends, buying a new sofa…. I see potential for a streamlined way to essentially ask “hey, guys, what about this one?”