Recently, Sears and Kmart launching their new community: MySears and MyKmart. The nice feature about those is customers can review products on-line, give them a rating, describe them and tell other users about their experience with them.
This is a real good step forward, for many reasons:
- It allows people to leverage their knowledge and make a better purchase experience
- It also suggests brands possible product improvement
- It pushes best products, praising them and allowing them to stand out in front of others
- It also allows a “light” sort of support: users can also interact with each other solving basic questions and problems.
What could really make this experience great?
There could be a tiny little step that makes the circle complete: automatic product identification.
Think about it: a barcode would make it all. Here’s how it could work:
- Consumers buy a product
- In front of their webcam or through a mobile App, they take a picture of the barcode
- They access the product and review, comment or rate it automatically, without having to search
But it could be really outstanding if people could take a snapshot of the barcode at the supermarket and view ratings, reviews and comments where they can decide for their purchase, in real time.
And one more step…
When MyKmart and MySears will be able to import your portable social graphs (e.g. via Facebook Connect), allowing users to be "portable", we will have the true social shopping, where peers and friends can suggest what to buy and support the consumer in its purchase choices.
...Just two more steps to social shopping...
How do you think this shopping experience could be improved even more?
