Gumroad. Reconciliate real store with virtual ones: the Walmart app. It’s the scourge of stores everywhere: “showrooming,” the act of going to a store to see and touch a product, then using your phone to find and order the same item for a lower price online. Some retailers have taken drastic measures to curb the practice, such as blocking barcodes. While likely futile, the effort to stop showrooming is an understandable if sometimes unsubtle reaction to fears of death by a billion clicks. But the world’s largest retailer hasn’t tried to build a fence to block showrooming.
Instead, in an act of digital judo, Walmart is urging shoppers to get out their smartphones when they come into a store. “You’ve got to go where the customer wants you to go. We live in the age of the customer,” Walmart.com President and CEO Joel Anderson told Wired in an interview this week. “We’re embracing showrooming.” This doesn’t mean Anderson would be happy if you bought from Amazon or eBay instead. “That’s not how customers think. “Consumers are going to be using these things. Taux de transformation - e-Commerce Q3 2011 Fevad. Etats-Unis : Le marché de l'e-commerce B to C. Personalized eCommerce Is Already Here, You Just Don’t Recognize It. Editor’s Note: This guest post is written by Nir Eyal (@nireyal), a founder of two startups and an advisor to several Bay Area incubators. Nir blogs about technology and behavior design at nirandfar.com. Reading Leena Rao’s recent article on Techcrunch about the personalization revolution, you get the sense that the tech world is waiting for a bus that isn’t coming.
Rao quotes well-known industry experts and luminaries describing what needs to happen for e-commerce to finally realize the promise of personalized shopping, a future where online retailers predict what you’ll want to buy before you know yourself. Ironically, Rao and her pundits are missing the zooming racecar that’s speeding by them as they wait for the personalization bus to arrive. That racecar is Pinterest and the new breed of startups marking the beginning of what I call the “Curated Web.”
The promise of personalized e-commerce began over 10 years ago with technology pioneered at Amazon. Users Want it All “Big deal?”