Get ready for e-retailing mash-ups
Using XML to integrate applications, online retailers will be able to provide through application “mash-ups” a more customized shopping experience that offers product selections across multiple categories—and even across multiple retail sites, experts say.
A mash-up within a single retailer’s site, for example, might automatically present multiple offerings of women’s and men’s outfits to a wife who shops for her husband as well as for herself, says David Fry, president of web site development and hosting firm Fry Inc.
Multiple retailers, such as ones specializing separately in women’s, men’s and children’s apparel, might agree to develop a mash-up that would present on each of their sites selections from all three categories to customers who shop for entire families, he adds.
“This is not terribly hard to do and is not technologically demanding,” Fry says. “But retailers will have to develop the business models to warrant the effort.”
Fry is speaking at the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition, June 4-7 in San Jose, in a session entitled
What Technology Is Coming and Why You Should Care.
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