Offline Online Shopping
We shop online, sure, but how come we don’t shop offline online? Confused? Don’t be, here’s something I’d expect e-commerce based retailers to start doing soon.
How New York and other cities are not already blanketed by Wi-Fi hot spots is beyond me. But rather than look at this lack of connectivity as a burden, I’ll look at it as an opportunity for online businesses. For this idea, we’ll look at Amazon.com, the online retail giant. Pop up shops have been trending for some time now, but I’m not certain there have been offline online pop-up shops. In order to do an online pop-up shop, you need to be online, of course. Making it an offline online experience comes from offering Wi-Fi for consumers in various areas of cities or towns. While you would pay rent for a physical pop-up shop, you wouldn’t pay rent if you provided internet access to say, a park. The park belongs to the City and people are free to congregate during park hours, so all Amazon needs to do is provide the internet access for people to get online and pair it with an incentive to shop offline online.
So, let’s say the pop-up shop is to be held in Madison Square Park in New York City, well then Amazon needs to provide access to the Park area only. Once you’re in the Park with your laptop or iPad, you’ll see the “Amazon” open network to join. When you connect to it, you’ll be directed to a specific Amazon landing page for people in the Park only. The page can either feature sales not normally searchable on Amazon.com or an checkout code to insert for a discount on your total purchase.
Like most pop-up shops, the goal is promotion based to attract new customers businesses may not have ordinarily had before the pop-up location. The customers themselves in the offline online shopping idea will be doing most of the heavy lifting with the promotion itself. Amazon simply needs to announce the location and time/date of the pop-up event and let the customers go to work on social networks telling their friends and family what’s going on. When people get to the Park, they’ll check into “Amazon Sale” rather than “Madison Square Park” on foursquare. Since you, Amazon has already provided them with internet access, why wouldn’t they share what is going on with status updates on Facebook and Twitter?
This is mainly a social experiment to rid the anti-social behavior associated with online shopping. When you shop online, you are usually alone at home. Having an event at one location allows people to come together to shop in groups or solo, but still part of a larger gathering. Being a part of something like a pop-up sale online in a park I believe will increase sales from those participating because people have tendencies to feel obligated to purchase something just to tell friends they were a part of whatever was going on. Any product purchased from the event now comes with the story of how Amazon provided internet for one day at a park; immediately this event has legs and word of mouth potential.
Now this doesn’t have to be done with Amazon (although their partnership with Sprint may make the Wi-Fi availability easy) and it doesn’t have to happen in a park. This can work for just about any business looking to bring their online consumers to an offline setting. You can easily announce a 20% discount at checkout, but you likely won’t create the same buzz possible about the brand, the experience and the products purchased. Worst case scenario, there are no purchases made (doubtful), but you increase your customer satisfaction and brand image by providing an entire park with Wi-Fi access. That’s not so bad now, is it?
