Page 107 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

86 3 Retailing in Electronic Commerce: Products and Services

broad range of products. An example of a comprehensive por- Of course, one of the most effective ways to “spy” on
tal is eCOST.com (ecost.com). Several public portals also Internet users is to introduce cookies and spyware to their
offer shopping opportunities and comparison aids. Examples computers (see Chapter 9 for details).
are shopping.com (part of the eBay Commerce Network),
shopping.yahoo.com, and pricegrabber.com. eBay (ebay.
com) is a shopping portal also because it offers shopping at Ratings, Reviews, and Recommendation Sites
fixed prices as well as auctions. Several of these evaluation
companies have purchasing shopbots or other, smaller shop- Ratings and reviews by friends, even by people that you do
ping aids, and have incorporated them into their portals. not know (e.g., experts or independent third-party evalua-
Some shopping portals offer specialized items with links tors), are usually available for social shoppers. In addition,
to certain products (e.g., books, phones) or services (univer- any user has an opportunity to contribute reviews and partici-
sities, hospitals). Such portals also help customers conduct pate in relevant discussions. The tools for conducting ratings
research. Examples include zdnet.com/topic-reviews and and reviews, which are presented next, are based on Gratton
shopper.cnet.com for computers, appliances, and electron- and Gratton (2012), bazaarvoice.com/solutions/conversa-
ics. The advantage of niche shopping portals is their ability tions, and the authors’ experiences. The major types of tools
to specialize in a certain line of products. and methods are:
For a comprehensive site with information on e-retailers,
B2B, marketing, etc., see Internet Retailer (internetretailer.
com).
• Customer ratings and reviews. Customer ratings
are popular; they can be found on product (or ser-
Price and Quality Comparison by Shopbot vice) pages or on independent review sites (e.g.,
Software Agents TripAdvisor) and/or in customer news feeds (e.g.,
Amazon.com, Buzzillions, and Epinions). Customer
Savvy Internet shoppers may want to find bargain shopping. ratings can be summarized by votes or polls.
Shopping robots (shopping agents, shopbots) are search • Customer testimonials. Customer experiences are
engines that look for the lowest prices or other search criteria. typically published on vendors’ sites, and third-
Different shopbots use different search methods. For exam- party sites such as TripAdvisor. Some sites encour-
ple, mySimon (mysimon.com) searches the Web to find the age discussion (e.g., Bazaarvoice Connections;
best prices and availability for thousands of popular items. bazaarvoice.com/solutions/connections).
• Expert ratings and reviews. Ratings or reviews
Google Enterprise Search and Enterprise can also be generated by domain experts and appear
Search Appliance in different online publications.
• Sponsored reviews. These reviews are written by
Google Enterprise Search helps companies search all inter- paid bloggers or domain experts. Advertisers and
nal and public-facing information. bloggers can find each other by searching through
Search is facilitated by a powerful server called Enterprise websites such as sponsoredreviews.com, which
Search Appliance which enables many flexible search connects bloggers with marketers and advertisers.
options including the search of some foreign languages. • Conversational marketing. People communicate
A similar service is offered by Search Spring (search- via e-mail, blog, live chat, discussion groups, and
spring.net). tweets. Monitoring conversations may yield rich
data for market research and customer service. An
“Spy” Services example of a conversational marketing platform is
Adobe Campaign (adobe.com/solutions/campaign-
In this context, “spy” services are not the CIA or MI5. Rather, management.html; formerly Neolane).
they are services that visit websites for customers, at their • Video product review. Reviews can be generated
direction, and notify them of their findings. Web surfers and by using videos. YouTube offers reviews that are
shoppers constantly monitor sites for new information, spe- uploaded, viewed, commented on, and shared.
cial sales, ending times of auctions, stock market updates, • Bloggers post reviews. This is a questionable
and so on, but visiting the sites to monitor them is time con- method, however, since some bloggers are paid and
suming. Several sites will track stock prices or airline special may use a biased approach. However, many blog-
sales and send e-mails accordingly. For example, money. gers have reputations as unbiased sources. For a list
cnn.com, pcworld.com, expedia.com, and alerts at google. of 50 product review blogs, see Sala (2012).
com/alerts will send people personalized e-mail alerts.