IMshopping, a human- powered shopping search site and Twitter shopping service, is rolling out a new feature, Merchant Answers, that lets consumers ask shopping questions directly on retailers’ sites via an embeddable chat widget. We reviewed IMshopping’s May launch here. IMshopping’s site is a shopping 411 service in which human guides on call respond to product questions and provide personalized recommendations for users about what product best suits their needs.
IMshopping’s Merchant Answer’s feature is similar in functionality, except it is branded and specialized for a particular retailer’s site. As a consumer is shopping on an e-commerce site, he or she will see a “get assistance” or similarly worded button on the site. When consumers click on this, they will be led to a window where they can ask a shopping question specific to that site. The question is routed to human shopping guides for an answer. Guides can be employees of the retailer or can be from IMshopping’s community of trained shopping guides. Answers are given back to the consumer with links to the product in question. Shoppers are also shown recent questions asked by other users on the retailers page.
Merchants can also use Twitter to help answer consumer questions. The merchant can link their Twitter account to their IMshopping account and once that is done, any Twitter user can send a message to the retailer’s account and the Tweet will automatically be answered by a shopping guide, with the answer sent back as a direct message.
IMshopping hopes to fill the gap of personalized, detail-oriented service that e-commerce sites don’t have, since these sites are focused less on answering technical questions about a product and more on price and reviews. IMshopping’s standalone site also leverages Twitter, so that users can directly ask questions by messaging @imshopping on Twitter and receive a direct message with the answer and product details.
So how is IMshopping making money from this new venture? The site has implemented a monthly subscription pricing model based on the volume of questions asked. For $300 per month, a retailer can get 300 questions answered, which includes the payment for IMshopping’s guides. For $1000 per month, a retailer can have 2500 questions answered, with additional guides included.
Twenty online retailers including BargainCell, AMB Furniture and Rainbow Appliance have already created shopping communities powered by IMshopping on their sites.
Since the startup’s launch in May, the site has delivered 52,000 human recommendations via Twitter and web. But as we’ve said in the past, human search hasn’t been to successful in the past; as evidenced by ChaCha’s former business model. While human assistance is definitely a powerful part of the shopping experience, many online retailer have online chat assistance to help with the process. IMshopping’s tool may resonate with smaller sites which have trouble doing this in-house but many major retailers already have this functionality.
I use twitter, but can we take a twitter break. My God everyday it is either twitter or Facebook. Okay there is an occasional Apple mentioned. There is a whole world out there to explore..
Quite Impressive one. Though human assistance is definitely a powerful part of the shopping experience online accounts too has an important role!we shall wait and watch.
I agree with John.
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Looks very similar to Product Recommend in the UK. They offer a similar service where you can ask a question about a product and get an answer via email or twitter. However they specialise in consumer electronics. I’m
http://www.prod...recommend.co.uk
Does IMshopping only recommend products from their own site – or from a range of online shops?
I don’t see anything so strangly different from the regular chat at various vendors site , yo there is a chat forum. For past few week Techcrunch is not providing the kind of news which we are were looking for- Hot and happening of IT world.
It would be better if they could have seprate place for apple store and twitter.
I love this concept, but we’ll see if the price model works. I personally think that merchants paying for a chance to answer the question makes way more sense.
Hi:
I am Prashant Nedungadi, CEO of IMshopping. IMshopping is not just a chat service for retailers. Our key value to retailers is that they can plug into the our community and as a result recruit experts from the community on an on-demand basis to offer pre-sales assistance on their own website (it is like recruiting in the cloud). A lot of merchants don’t have a sales force to sell their stuff and it is not cost effective to have fulltime/hourly employees given the sporadic/spiky nature of questions asked.
The second value is that we create unique SEO content for the merchant in the form of Q&A that links back to their products. Some of our existing customers have already seen an immediate increase in organic traffic to their stores as a result of this.
Finally, we help merchants reach out to potential customers beyond their websites. We help them leverage channels like twitter, facebook etc.
Merchants continue to differentiate themselves in different ways beyond just priceand reach out to shoppers through multiple channels. Our goal is to help these merchants differentiate themselves and help close sales.
BTW, Danny, you are right about merchants offering sponsored answers to questions on our site (like an adwords for Q&A). Something in the works.
Regards,
Prashant Nedungadi, CEO IMshopping
I’ve tried Get Satisfaction on my site. At the time it didn’t fit my business model. This does look interesting with the IM/Twitter integration. I find myself answering product inquires more via Facebook/Twitter. Good for SME but I think it would also work with major retailers. Implementing something like this could bring down call center volume.
Though there are similar services, let us welcome this too. Twitter is growing everyday. How far Twitter is going to manage the traffic?