LivePerson offers online chats with personal shoppers

Can’t find the right dress to go with your new handbag? Out of birthday gift ideas for Aunt Sue? LivePerson Inc., which provides chat services for online retailers and service providers like banks and mobile phone companies, is testing a service that provides befuddled consumers with expert shoppers to guide them through the retail maze.

At LivePersonalShoppers.com, consumers can choose among several presumably more well-informed consumers to provide product suggestions in such areas as apparel, accessories, gifts, home furnishings, wine and cosmetics. Initial tests began in November with 50 participants, and since January LivePerson has been driving traffic to the site, primarily through paid search, says CEO Robert LoCascio.

He says the site attracts about 10,000 consumers a month, and that they act on the expert shopper’s suggestion about half the time. That is a higher conversion rate than LivePerson sees with its 5,000 clients, which include such retailers as Macy’s, Overstock.com and Neiman Marcus. LivePerson handles 4.5 million chats a month and about 25% of those chats lead to purchases, he says.

LoCascio says the company has not decided how to charge for the shopping service. He says the company could charge retailers for leads, or charge consumers using the service. He says some consumers who have used LivePersonalShoppers.com have wanted to tip the helpful expert on the other side of the chat. “It’s usually around 10% of whatever they think the transactional value is,” he says. The service is free during the test phase.

LivePerson has another motive besides making money off the personal shopping feature. “The No. 1 reason we have the site is to enhance our core business,” LoCascio says. “We sell chat for customer support and sales to web sites. We want to push the idea that consumers want chat when they want to buy something.”

The personal shoppers at LivePersonalShoppers.com can recommend any retailer, LoCascio says, although “they have a familiarity with our base of customers.” He says consumers who choose to use the chat service may want to deal with retailers the same way, and the personal shoppers can transfer a customer to one of LivePerson’s retail clients to continue the dialogue.

During the test phase, only a few of the several personal shoppers on the site are available at any given time. When an Internet Retailer reporter tried out the service he was prompted to enter his question on a form. He asked for suggestions on a gift for his wife and received an e-mail response a few hours later. The personal shopper, Emily, provided links to three retail sites: Nordstrom.com, which is not a LivePerson client, and RedEnvelope.com and UncommonGoods.com, which are.

LoCascio says his company still is developing the personal shopping site. A feature added recently makes it easy for a blogger to add a button to a web log connecting to a particular LivePerson personal shopper. There is a navigation bar option for such “chatlets” that leads to a page with the HTML code that can be pasted into a blog template. “We’ve got some fashion bloggers who say, ‘This is cool. I would like to take Emily and put her button on our blog,’” LoCascio says.

He says he expects the shopping site will be ready for a full-scale launch in three months. LivePerson Inc. reported net income of $2.2 million in 2006 on revenue of $33.5 million.