Online shopping market is rapidly growing in America. According to the report of Forrester, the market size would be 27 billion dollars, increasing by 17% appared to the past year.
Until now, many people think that online shopping is driven by the price-competitiveness and customization. And the latter is induced by a buying record or a personal wishlist.
And now, the paradigm might be little bit changed to visual search like Google’s Boutiques.com. Google acquired the visual search company, Like.com, at 100million dollars. This smart shopping company has two subsidiaries, ‘Covet.com’ and ‘ Couturious.com’.
[ Service figure of ‘Like.com’ ]
Boutiques.com provides only women’s clothes but will expand its providing items. Users choose their favorate stylists and they can have detail items. If clicking the item, it links to the merchant mall which users can buy it.
[ the 1st page of ‘Boutiques.com’ ]
[ the 2nd page after choosing the stylist ]
Experts in this industry say that Google’s search engine for shopping service is apparently behind the rivals such as Amazon and e Bay. But this attempt is interesting. Google doesn’t has any plan to sell items but giving search platform and customization tool to users. This intelligent recommending system might be powerful via setting up the gateway of various shopping channels even including Amazon and e Bay. As the so-called vertical shopping portal, I wonder whether it’s successful in near future.