How Will You Browse Online?
Why do people shop online? Convenience? No sales tax? Bigger selection? Discounted prices? Maybe the better question would be why people continue to shop offline. For some, window shopping is like a hobby. I'm sure many of us have visited a mall for no apparent reason other than to kill some time and maybe purchase something as an afterthought. But it's that impulse buy that retailers love. It's the magazine rack at the grocery store checkout, the new video game endcap display in the electronics store, and the rows of candy just about everywhere that stimulates our visual senses and makes us forget about checking the price or asking "do I really need that?" Until now, window shopping and impulse buying were strictly offline activities. But finally the web has found a way for us to forget about what search term brought us to a page, and simply browse.
Meet Amazon's Windowshop.com. There's no easy way to describe how the site differs from other web pages except to say that traditional navigation has been turned on its head. You can get lost scrolling through the products, which combine images, video, music, purchasing, product descriptions, all within a single screen. The site is in beta and the biggest criticism is that it contains a very limited product set. Given Amazon's vast warehouse of product catalogs, however, it's easy to see how this site could rival the company's flagship in traffic once it's fully launched.
Check it out and let me know what you think. In a few years, are most webpages going to look like this instead of the series of lists and product pages that we see today? Will it take a quick scroll of the mouse instead of five clicks to get to the information you want? Or is this just a conceptual site that won't change anything about the way people shop online?
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interesting iTunes merchandising approach
I like parts of the approach - but with a large offering - people will get lost
the intriguing part is the automated online sampling of the content, but there is no product depth.
For example, the new Nickelback album there is no listing of tracks, no history of the band, no suggestions for comparable tunes/brands
I dont think in its current beta configuration that it will survive as a main stream offering for the misses I listed above.
thxs for giving us a peek into the future
Miro