This year I promised myself I would be more organised than in previous years. I promised myself I would start my Christmas shopping sometime before December 21. I usually do a lot of shopping online, including gift buying. It's quicker, easier and it means that I can spend my days off not having to shop.
But Christmas is different. I prefer (or thought I did) to go to a real shopping centre. Experience the excitement, the atmosphere, check out the new products, revel in the "sales"... Since I had an opening in my calendar today, I figured I might as well trek to a Shopping Centre (Shopping Centres- another reason why Cities are Dead) and see if I couldn't purchase some presents and feel some of that festive excitement and buzz. And what's better, it's still November, so I would get to feel all warm and fuzzy for starting my Christmas shopping so early...
But after 10 minutes driving around the car park looking for a spot, I had no more excitement. I couldn't have given a stuff about the carols, decorations and all round yule-tide atmosphere inside the walls of the building I was circling like a predator. I almost went back home to my safety and dull world of my computer and desk. It's not as exciting, doesn't have the same thrill as shopping in the real world. But it's less stressful. And at the moment, I'd go for less stressful.
It appears as though Seth might have had the same sort of experience, " How come they never have sales online?"
Why can't the excitement in the offline, real world of retail be replicated in the quiet, static world of online shopping. "Better buy it now before the sale ends..." and all of that impulse inducing blurb.
But Seth is a great thinker, and he came up with an extension of froogle (googles online shopping engine):
Not news.google.com
but
news.froogle.com
A place you can go to and see news about sales and bargains and closeouts and new stores. Probably would need a human editor, which isn't very google-like, but hey.
It would be like trying to create the anticipation and thrill towards the end of an e-Bay auction when you are in a bidding war. It's exciting and great fun... it creates an real-time, online shopping experience. And that's something that is missing from traditional on-line shopping sites, but something that many people enjoy during the Christmas period.
(And while they are at it how about a dot-com-dot-au extension for froogle?)
I agree with his point. Right now shopping is a very search and buy experience. Where is the merchandising? Where is the personal suggestion? I spent 5 years at AOL overseeing the Women's audience and now run shefinds.com - blog.shefinds.com for the blog - that helps busy women shop online.
Posted by: michelle madhok | Monday, November 29, 2004 at 11:51 PM