The most shocking moment (so far) at the Retail Innovation & Marketing Conference came at about 3:30 p.m. when Norwest Venture Partners’ Joshua Goldman explained how online retailer Swoopo works during a session on extreme retailing.
The site sells premium products via an auction-like system. Registered users purchase bids (at $0.60 apiece) that they can use to bid on products. Each bid affects the price of the product and the duration of the auction. One lucky customer “wins” the product, usually at a severely discounted price. As the conference attendees saw, one fortunate Swoopo customer purchased a Macbook Pro for a fraction of its original retail price … and Swoopo made more than $10k off the purchase. Conference attendees gasped aloud and the tweets flew. Clearly, Swoopo is onto something new and surprising.
Swoopo represents one of the upcoming trends (game mechanics) that Goldman illustrated during his brief session. First, however, Goldman highlighted three ongoing trends (and examples) that are unlikely to go away anytime soon: deals and discounts (seen on RetailMeNot), urgency (seen with woot!) and exclusivity/private member buying (seen on Gilt Groupe). Then he outlined five trends to watch for:
- Local discovery & promotion
- Mobile empowerment
- Community and crowdsourcing
- Mass customization
- Game Mechanics/entertainment commerce
Another fascinating example was Retrevo. To use Retrevo, customers tweet a product name at Retrevoq and it responds with product information such as what a fair price for that product would be and a link to a wealth of information about the product on the Retrevo’s Web site. The site, like Swoopo, taps several of the upcoming trends outlined above.
The audience reactions to some of Goldman’s examples show that many of these new ideas are not yet mainstream, but they clearly demonstrate trends worth watching. These types of game-changing companies and trends have the potential to transform how consumers buy products — and how retailers sell them.