Future of Online Shopping
1 09 2011Here is a glimpse into the future of online shopping from Korea. What is exciting and significant here is that customers using mobile phones are able to use QR codes to short cut straight to a shopping cart by scanning those codes directly off a poster.
We have seen some use of QR codes and mostly it has been trivial to date.
“A QR code (abbreviated from Quick Response code) is a type of matrix barcode (or two-dimensional code) designed to be read by smartphones. The code consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on a white background. The information encoded may be text, a URL, or other data.”
For QR codes to be useful shoppers need to have access to a QR reader cable ecommerce shopping system, a smart phone and fast, inexpensive mobile data.
The display posters are close to lifesize photos of each of the products. I can see this is an exceptional idea for extending online shopping functionality to busy locations where a billboard space might be available.
In effect shoppers are able to browse the equivalent of a several metres wide screen image of key products without going near a computer. Although to be fair their smart phones do need to be able to read the qr codes off the posters.
We need to do some more research on exactly how to do this for online shopping sites but I suspect billboard owners will be extremely excited about this
My QR code is displayed at left and if you have a reader you can scan my contact details but just imagine I could also sell you an ecommerce report at the same time.
Now we’re talking business !
P.S We’ve been watching all of the coupon sites and while that seems like a good way to drive offline media traffic on to online channels not all deals work that well for vendors or the media channels.
Also the price of accessing the old media (TV for the most part) is still expensive and the unintended consequences of a huge rush of traffic to a website or physical store is not easy to manage or profit from. Getting repeat business is not easy to do if most of the shoppers are deal takers who just chase discounts.
“We’ve also heard consistently from certain categories of businesses (very popular ones I’m afraid) that daily deals are uneconomic for them, which does raise questions around the sustainability of “50% off” daily deals for these types of businesses.”
Yelp CEO says they are working on new developments to the daily deal type of business.
My money is on QR codes and this store concept from Korea is the future of online stores and no unsustainable 50% off foolish deals are needed to get more online business by heading down the QR path.
Thanks for sharing this link with me Jason. We’ve done a little work with QR codes in the past – we actually had a Plugin but it stopped working with WPEC 3.8, I might actually ask Michelle to revisit it, and get it going like she did with our BuddyPress Commerce Plugin
One thing I want to do is look at embedding little graphics into them – in the QR code image itself – I havent yet been able to do that.
Thanks Dan, I reckon this is a real winner for ticket sales, even t-shirt sales at a conference. If online store owners could start buying billboard space with a measurable ROI then that would be good for them and billboard owners as well. This could also be the future of point of sale advertising in store as well. Giving shoppers more convenience and more choices of self service is always a good way to boost business success.