The Social Side of Shopping - Page 2
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Baynote offers another twist on the personalization question. The company markets a technology to online retailers that aims to take the recommendation process beyond Amazon's model of suggesting a product based on past purchases and other people's shopping decisions.
Baynote's technology claims to analyze "digital fingerprints" -- factors like how many times people click on a product or how long they look at it -- to enable the retailer to display the most relevant products for a particular user.
Of course, this year the sour economy is casting a long shadow over the holiday shopping season, with analysts from all corners projecting a declining growth rate. For the first 23 days of November, comScore reported that online spend dropped 4 percent from the same period in 2007. The firm is projecting flat growth for the entire season, but has also suggested that weakened consumer spending could breathe new life into the still-nascent online coupon industry.
Even coupons are getting more social. One startup, called RetailMeNot, maintains an online coupon forum where members can access promotional codes for participating online retailers, and then leave feedback about any restrictions or special instructions for redeeming it, or note if it is no longer valid.
But coupons are a sidelight compared to some of the aggressive promotional strategies that online retailers are planning to deploy this year as they court cash-strapped shoppers. A recent study by Shop.org, the trade group representing the online retail industry, found that 84 percent of online merchants plan to offer some kind of promotion this year, such as free shipping or one-day sales.
MediaForge's Zito said that those promotions should translate into a retailer's messaging across the social Web.
"For e-retailers, social strategies should enable the other promotions, providing additional distribution points," Zito said. "At the core, social strategies should remind users of the brand's value proposition to the user."
