Shopping As Implementation in Ecommerce Websites

Shopping As Implementation

Hi I am Mark Mandel and independent retail consultant. I have worked in Retail in the UK and Europe for 30 years, for companies such as Tesco, ASOS.com and Superdry. These blogs represent my own personal views and not the views or systems of any particular company.

Thanks to customdrumloops on fiverr for the great video.

What I am missing online is the ability to use a "Shopping As" feature as described in the video.

See this video on how Shopping As might be implemented..

Although I see a need for a “Shopping As” type implementation I recognise that there are a number of challenges to implementing it.

From my understanding there is no widely used standard for a customer shopping ID, though some are defined if for example if you let your customers sign-in with Google+, Twitter or Facebook.

In my experience the customer ID system/database of any Ecommerce site is usually quite old fashioned. They tend to be created during the startup of a new Ecommerce business without too much thought and generally changed little over the years as the business grows. Although in some cases they may be ported into a full CRM system in many cases they are not.

As the customer ID system/database is integrated into many other back-office systems, such as warehouse management and marketing and even into third-party systems such as couriers, then making changes to it may have a prohibitively expensive impact on many systems and third-parties. This is why they tend to be changed very rarely.

A kind of informal standard has been created as most Ecommerce websites ask for 90% of the same data elements when registering, with an additional 10% appropriate to their particular market for example gender and size for fashion sites.

In terms of other requirements of Shopping AS I would say that they are:

• Only the main ID would be allowed to checkout
• Sub-Id’s would be allowed to add to the basket so that different family members can add to the basket at different times.
• Customers should be free to enter as many or as few details on each Shopping As ID, rather than have to enter 50 data elements for each family member. Far better to allow customers to add them as appropriate
• On order completion the shopping habits of each Shopping As id would be updated separately to ensure appropriate similar and complementary products are shown on the next shop

There is little co-operation on standards between UK and Ireland large Ecommerce businesses. I would suggest that adopting this as industry standard would reduce implementation costs for merchants as they could pressure software suppliers to spread the development costs across all of their customers, rather than each merchant paying for individual developments.

A standard could reassure customers with a similar online experience.

I am sure that the technical challenges in mobile implementations are far greater than on just websites. What is your view, is Shopping As a feature you want?

Is my video sexist?

A note on the video, having reviewed it, I hope its not viewed as sexiest, it is very much my own personal experience of how I shop with my family., I am not saying only men should shop online! I am sure that in many families somebody other than the husband would place the order. No offence was intended.