Social Shopping
part of the ArsDigita Community System
by Philip Greenspun
and Michael Yoon
The Big Idea
People drove me (Philip) insane at photo.net asking shopping questions
in what was supposed to be a photography technique Q&A forum. If these
pinheads had a shopping question, why didn't they call up a frigging
camera store?
It hit me: they were terrified of buying the wrong thing. Photography
is a strange and technical field. There are more than 1000 cameras on
the market and more than 100,000 regularly-sold accessories. Many times
the differences between models are insignificant. Camera manufacturing
is a 150-year-old industry and most differentiation is simply marketing.
So the plastic-electronic single-lens-reflex bodies from Canon, Minolta,
and Nikon will all take the same pictures. Yet to achieve a particular
photographic goal, one often needs specialized equipment.
Consider the photo at right. It was taken with 300/2.8 lens that costs
$4500 and is rather too bulky to carry around most of the time. The
average camera store will not keep this lens in stock and the clerk will
be unfamiliar with it. You can ask his opinion of the alternatives:
300/4, 400/2.8, 500/4.5, 600/4, 300/2.8 plus 1.4X and 2X
teleconverters. The clerk will never have physically handled any of
these lenses and probably won't know that the 300/2.8 is great for bears
but too short for birds.
There are little thousands of weird little accessories in the Nikon and
Canon SLR lines. Which cables and connectors do you need to use two
flashes with a Canon EOS-5? Even the best camera store might not give
you the right answer.
What is needed is the virtual equivalent of the physical store where
geeks hang out and schmooze. If you go to real professional camera
store, you'll often find a shopper conversing as much with fellow
customers as with the salespeople. The sales person is best qualified
to give price and stock information but the other shoppers are often
better qualified to say whether Item X fits Situation Y.
The Shopper's Experience
- shopper comes to an ACS-backed site and picks a social shopping
forum (or more likely follows a link in)
- shopper clicks on the "ready to buy" link
- shopper types in text to explain his or her need and may upload a
photo or document to elaborate
- shopper clicks to agree to a condition of usage: they promise to
respond to two questions following their purchase ("How did you like the
merchant from whom you bought?" and "How did you like the product?")
- merchants and other users who've asked for email alerts get mail
saying "new buyer is on the forum" (with the full text of the shopping
situation)
- merchants may post offers to supply the goods desired. If the
shopper has left some ambiguity in the item desired (the usual
situation), the merchant will explain exactly what he plans to supply
and also a written explanation of why he thinks this is the best
solution for the shopper's problem. An offer by a merchant is
immediately emailed to the shopper. An offer by a merchant may be
publicly available in the thread depend on how the publisher sets
policies and what the merchant chooses (if the policy allows a choice).
- other users of the site post suggestions, which are immediately made
public. These suggestions are also emailed to the shopper.
A Merchant's Private Pages
In the /social-shopping/merchant/ directory, a merchant will find pages
that show
- summary statistics of offers made, offers accepted, dollar value of
transactions
- currently open offers (made to shoppers who've not yet made up their
mind); should be smart enough to exclude shoppers who randomly
disappeared, e.g., each forum should have a specified number of days
after which a consumer's shopping quest is considered stale
Levels of Moderation/Administration
The site administrator via the /admin/social-shopping/ directory does
the following:
- decides what social shopping forums will be available on a site,
e.g., cameras, cars, and computers
- decides on the publishing policies in each forum, e.g.,
merchant_approval_policy
- decides which users will get moderation responsibility for each
forum
- views statistics on forum usage
A designated moderator in a particular forum can do the following:
- approve or disapprove a posting from either a user or a merchant
- edit postings
- approve a merchant's application (if the publisher has set the
policy to require this)
- invite a merchant to participate
Software Engineering
We build this system on the bones of the /bboard
system and the permissions package.
We may want to use the ecommerce system as well since it already has a
way for a user to say "I want to sign up as a retailer" and for multiple
users to have authority to maintain a retailer's prices and inventory.
There are two fundamental modes that we have to support:
- shopper types textual description of what he wants to buy
(appropriate for photographic equipment shopping where the range of
products and packages is enormous)
- shopper selects item he is considering purchasing from the products
table in the ecommerce module (appropriate
for simpler markets, e.g., cars)
So I guess we support this with a nullable column that references the
products table. The publisher decides for each forum whether it is Mode
1 or Mode 2 (and if it is Mode 2, what range of stuff from the products
table should be selectable; you don't want gardening shoppers having to
wade through cameras or cars).
For Version 1 of this module, to be applied at photo.net, it is
sufficient to implement only Mode 1 (textual descriptions). But leave
enough hooks in to do Mode 2.
philg@mit.edu