I’ve always been wondering about shopping on the Internet. And I’ve never been entirely satisfied. What’s the added value over “real-life” shopping? There’s a certain ease of use, you can just shop from your living room. And most online shops have a much larger inventory. But in return you’re giving up the experience of browsing through a shop. Randomly picking up stuff and sampling it. Grab a book and read a few pages, pre-listen a CD to see if you might like it, etc.
Amazon Windowshop tries to recreate this browsing experience. And I think it does a very good job at it. You can immediately listen to previews of CDs and watch DVD trailers (something which is not possible in most real shops) and browse quickly. I believe this is a major step towards “the online shop of the future”. Exactly how that shop will look, I don’t know yet. If I knew I would be building it right now.
I think 3D might be part of it, but my experiments with 3D plugins for browsers have not yielded any satisfactory result that a person might want to use on regular basis.
So the search for the perfect digital shop continues. What are your ideas? Do you like the search box and list displays of the current online shop, or do you believe there’s something better out there, waiting to be discovered?
One Comment
shopping online is really wonderful and easy.. you just need to have with you your credit card or paypal account