Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited Fidji Simo to write about web strategies and provide you with insights on how to manage and develop small & medium businesses. Fidji’s mission statement is that there’s no mission statement: what matters most is to start nice conversations and have fun.

It will surprise nobody that, for the first article written by a woman on Tech IT Easy, I will speak about online shopping, and especially about how to find and compare products online.

The fact that search engines are becoming the entry gate for any search on the Internet gives them a competitive advantage with the growth in online shopping, as customers use them also as product search engines.

That is why a lot of shopping comparators are becoming click brokers: they invest a lot in Adwords to attract customers who start their product search on Google, and then display a lot of Adsense on their pages (just next to product flow) to convert the maximum of visitors into clickers. No major comparator can avoid it, as none of them have managed to create brand loyalty, not even Kelkoo which sees its organic traffic decreasing.

But this type of monetization tends to provide a bad user experience: traditional shopping comparators (or price comparators in this case) just do not manage to reinvent themselves.

The question to ask is: which service would you really like to use when you look for a product? What is still missing in the market?

I will focus on three major trends which will probably force the giants of product search / comparison to innovate at a higher rhythm: visual, social and mobile shopping.

A few weeks ago, in the South of France, I saw a beautiful sofa with coloured pillows in the window of a closed shop. Nothing was there to indicate the brand of the sofa, so I just took a picture. I tried to search “sofa with coloured pillows” on Google and Shopping.com (an eBay company, so I show some loyalty!), and of course you can guess that I did not manage to find my sofa. But with Like.com (US product search engine) I would have found it immediately: indeed, you just have to upload your picture of a specific object and the picture is considered as a query. Then Like.com browses its database to help you find products with a similar graphic signature. And finally, here is my sofa! If you fall in love with Cameron Diaz’s purse (screenshot in this article) without knowing the designer, you can search for similar purses thanks to a picture of it.

Visual shopping is expected to boom in the years to come: in France, Shopoon (PPR group) is planning to launch a visual application based on LTU technology.

But you do not always run into a beautiful sofa; sometimes, the best way to find an amazing product is to have a friend recommending one. This is the trend of social shopping. It has started in France with Ciao! including customers’ advice on products, but new models tend to leverage even more the influence of other customers / friends. But the problem with models like Zlio (you create your own shop to sell your products, essentially to friends) or Xinek (you get a commission when a friend buy a product you have recommended) is that they erase the basement of social shopping: basically, you rely on friends or other customers because they have no interest in selling a special product, which is exactly not the case in those models! So I think that the future on social shopping will be based on websites ranking products according to customers’ satisfaction (Vozavi) and specs (Looneo) or on crawlers aggregating all the available content of a product (Wikio Shopping, if they improve their crawler).

Finally, people (especially women!) who search for good bargains would love to compare prices and specs even when they are shopping offline. Htfacile has launched in France a mobile comparator service: you enter on your mobile the bar code of a product when you are at the supermarket and it returns the 3 cheapest prices found on the Internet. In the US, Slifter goes further: you can now take a picture of the bar code with your mobile, and Slifter returns the best prices for this product both online and offline in your specific location. If the best price can be found in a store in your geographic area, Slifter gives you the map to go to this store on your mobile! I don’t know if I would use it for everyday purchases, but for expensive products it would definitely save me some time and money! In terms of business model, it increases the number of opportunities to use shopping comparators, and revenues for those applications at the same time.

According to market researches, people would like to have a shopping hub where they can find all the shopping-related services. Personally, I would love to have those 3 trends in one: take a picture with my camera phone, get a list of matching products on my mobile with customers’ advice!

And you, how would you like to find, compare and choose products online?

At last, I did it! Tonight I hacked my very first Gadget for Windows Vista. It’s a simple gadget, with no other feature than thanking you for being so faithful to Tech IT Easy. But overall, if I can hack (actually, I can script) a .gadget file that works in roughly 35 minutes, pretty much anyone can do it. Since all you need to deliver at the end of the day are an .html file and a .xml file, the only tool you need – I can assure you, is good old Notepad.

For those of you who feel like giving it a try, here’s my source code:

• For the jeremy.html document:

<html>

<style>

body {

width:120;

height:120;

}

</style>

<body>

We love you! The Tech IT Easy bloggers

</body>

</html>

• The jeremy.xml javascript file:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″ ?>

<gadget>

<name>We love you! The Tech IT Easy bloggers</name>

<namespace>microsoft.windows</namespace>

<version>0.1<version>

<author name=”Jeremy Fain”>

<info url=”www.techiteasy.org” />

</author>

<copyright>Not necessary, but let’s say it’s strategic: Copyright (c) 2007 </copyright>

<description>A gadget that displays a nice message to our readers in Windows Vista’s Sidebar</description>

<icons>

<icon width=”120″ height=”120″ src=tieweloveyou.png” />

</icons>

<hosts>

<host name= “sidebar”>

<base type=”HTML” apiVersion=”1.0.0″ src=”jeremy.html” />

<permissions>full</permissions>

<platform minPlatformVersion=”0.3″ />

</host>

</host>

</gadget>

• Deployment

Just create your Gadget Manifest from your .xml file, put it in a new folder alongside with the .html file, zip it and rename it .gadget. Vista will then recognize the file as a new Gadget of its own and all you’ll have to do is select it in your Sidebar and run it.

 

Conclusion

From what I see at work everyday, there’s hell a lot of market traction for Vista gadgets, which appear to be great customer relationship & buzz marketing tools for all sorts of companies and start ups. Creating a gadget (next time I’ll try to hack my first Ajax app in a gadget) is so simple, even for a really crappy developer like me, that if by accident I find myself available, professionally speaking, then I would seriously consider opening a Vista Gadget Factory to remain in the ecosystem and grow with the MS tree. And I guess you should too.

 

Many thanks to Clauer for the learning resource links:

English resources:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/topics/vista/gadgets-pt1.mspx

http://microsoftgadgets.com/Sidebar/DevelopmentOverview.aspx

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=1063&SiteID=1

 

French resources:

http://lgmorand.developpez.com/articles/sidebar-gadget/

http://blogs.msdn.com/fredeq/pages/questions-fr-quentes-sur-les-desktop-gadgets.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/france/vision/mstechdays/ (watch Clauer’s webcast on how to write a Gadge, it’s amazing)