Reproducing offline shopping experience, online?

For most readers of this blog, shopping online is usually not an issue.  However, for most customers, the path to the Thank you page can be hard and complex.  A lot of effort is put on making the shopping cart steps as efficient and clear as possible (the famous conversion funnel), in order to improve the conversion rate.  However, not many retailers offer other kinds of support, which might lead to either online or offline conversion.  Here comes the co-shopping.

Co-shopping tools (such as Clavardon or BrowsePal) are born with the social web trend.  The goal was to allow online customers to do window-shopping and go through the buying process together, by giving them tools to navigate and communicate together while browsing a web site.  These features can be used by many different actors:

  • Pure strangers, only having in common the same interest for the products available online;
  • Friends, reproducing online what used to be a face-to-face activity :) ;
  • Customer service representatives, helping customers like in-store personnel.

In every case, all these interactions can lead to higher conversion since customers are not let to themselves anymore.  To me, the last type of interaction is the one with the most potential, as retailers can then provide an enhanced online experience to their customers.  For speciality shops (which cannot/don’t want to compete on price), this is a nice opportunity to explore as they therefore have a way to get in touch more closely with their customers and provide them useful information to support their buying process, even while being online.

Such tools can be expensive and require a lot of human power to support customers (like in-store activites), but other ideas can also be integrated to shopping cart steps to increase the conversion rate.  One of them is to make the customer service phone number easily available through the process (sorry, I couldn’t find any website as an example).  This way, a customer stuck for any reason in the buying process has the opportunity to call the company to either find assistance to complete the online buying process, or to complete the buying process offline, over the phone.  In the end, co-shopping should help online retailers increasing their customer conversion rate, and make the shopping process a more human experience.

Have you experienced such a tool while shopping online?  What other opportunities do you see to make online experience a better one?  Feel free to share your thoughts (in French or in English) with us!

Thanks to Yannick and Caroline (two colleagues from Alogient) for the initial discussion that triggered this post.