Web 2.0 in the space of Commerse

In thinking about Web 2.0 one needs to look at the relavance of this technology stack in terms of how it influences the end-users and the consumers of the web content. As promomised in my earlier blog, Web 2.0 - The Real Power I am writing about the impact of this phenomenon on commerce‼!

A commercial web site that is interactive or an eCom solution that offers exciting end-user experience, personalization and one that promotes end-user participation is considered to be very successful in translating this level of participation into "sales" as it influeces the end-users purchase decisions.

Commerse sites such as EBay, Amazon etc. have had much success in this regard. Some of the high level benefits of carefully employing these sets of Web 2.0 technologies may be listed as follows:

1. Use end-user product reviews to suggest alternative product usage ideas that can be used for marketing campaigns. These could be used to cross-sell and up-sell other related products and accessories on the syndicated and partner sites as well.

2. Increase customer participation and level of interest by actively seeking opinions on products or even increase customer satisfaction by polling for ideas of improvement. These comments and feedback are then available to customer support and to marketing personnel.

3. Leverage other blogs and wikis for word of mouth testimonials on your products.

4. Provide customers with RSS feeds of promotional prices and new product introductions. Also, the same mechanism can be used to make product promotional information available to syndicated web sites and other partner sites to realize cross-sell and up-sell oppurtunities. Alternatively, one can use a competitors' RSS feed to "subscribe" to these types of promotional events whereby this information could be used to alter one's own pricing and promotional model.

5. Leverage the reviews and market research thoughts from consumers to obtain new product ideas and end-user reaction to potential new product ideas.

As can be seen much can be done using the Web 2.0 paradigm to increase sales oppurtunities, improve customer satisfaction and to influence consumer purchase decisions. In addition, in some cases "knowledgable" customers actually increase chances of success in introducing a technologically advanced product and may in turn positively impact the purchase/repurchase behavior of others as well.

Thank you for your feedback.
surekha -