Can ‘discovery shopping’ save e-commerce from being boring?

In this guest post, Duke Marr and Gavin McLeod wonder if discovery shopping – the merging of social media and e-commerce – will take off in Australia

When online shopping began in the late 1990s, merchants didn’t really know what the heck they were doing. How should they help consumers find the products they wanted? How should they up-sell or cross-sell as they would in a retail store? How could they convince buyers to type in their credit card numbers?

Then a few pure-play market leaders burst onto the scene—most notably, Amazon and eBay—and everyone eventually copied their user experiences, including traditional Australian retailers like David Jones and Myer. The examples learned from Amazon and eBay evolved into best practices, and adhering to them allowed most online merchants to design and build websites that were familiar to consumers and a steadily growing source of revenue. So much so, in fact, that global e-commerce sales are predicted to surpass one trillion euros in 2013, according to a new report from the Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG). That’s an astonishing number given how young the industry is.