Monday, July 18, 2011

Consumer = authority for B&M, but what about Online Stores?

I don't need to belabor the point that has been covered in recent lectures supporting the new found authority consumers hold in a Web 2.0 world, but something struck me as very odd as I was doing social media research for our Digital Media Project for Thrillist. Suddenly I stumbled upon the realization that there is no real equivalent of Yelp, for example, for online stores. It's true, I don't make any purchases anymore without checking user ratings, be it through a dedicated service such as Yelp or a feature through an e-commerce site like Amazon...but where can I find a substantial volume of user ratings for a purely online service like Thrillist? I think that there is a huge opportunity here.

Sites like Yelp have made brand equity more important than ever before. Especially in a phase where discount deals and flash sales are exponentially increasing, wouldn't Thrillist want to be on a UGC site and rated, ideally, higher, than it's competitors like GiltCity? I did some research and there are site that have dabbled in this, such as StellaService, which has Amazon listed with no ratings, and Thrillist does not even show up. Clearly such a B2C offering needs to gain some traction, but I don't buy that this stuff is useful only for brick and mortar establishments.

Sure, there is no in-store experience, but Thrillist Rewards has plenty of other stuff if could be rated on, like service, deal quality, and most importantly, frequency with which the deal was really "deal". In a time where I get 10 flash sale emails a day, such service would greatly aid me in managing my emails, cutting out the dead weight and refocusing on the sales that are "best".

No comments: