Crowdsourcing & Mass Customization Ecommerce

Ecommerce is expanding rapidly and has been one of the few bright spots in the financial meltdown. However, the standard string search+algorithm based shopping experience may soon give way to new and more interesting shopping patterns. A couple developments, mass customization technology and crowd sourced designs, promise to change the way we shop in the future. New shopping behaviors are beginning to emerge:

1. Visual Search and Tweaks

Custom jewelry start up Paragon Lake utilizes 3D printers and a web based tool called the “Virtual Display Case” to give customers nearly endless variety. In consultation with a jeweler, customers can select designs from a web-based catalog and tweak them by changing materials and stones. Once satisfied, their design can be produced on demand. It is a brilliant addition to the traditional jewelry manufacturing process that expands product offerings while working within its existing constraints. The designers of the service understand most people have “taste” but not the training to execute a design from scratch. Paragon Lake enables customers to find something (designed by a professional) that they like and give it a little twist that makes it their own.

2. Experimentation

Swiss bag maker Freitag is another company that understands that people like designing, but haven’t logged the thousands of hours learning a CAD program to do so. Freitag’s Flash-based “F-Cut” system gives customers a set of templates which represent the fabric panels that comprise a messanger bag. Instead of using standard fabrics, all of their bags are made from tarapulins from the sides of trucks. Each tarp has unique graphics providing a constantly changing palette. The customer drags and drops the template over the tarp, gets a real time preview, and can reposition the template until satisfied. The only limitation is once a portion of the tarp has been used it is gone forever. Removing options from a customer seems counterintuitive, but it forces customers to be creative and the design tool makes it easy to make something attractive. The design tool becomes like a video game, makes the customer feel creative, and is a great strategy that will pay off in increased loyalty.

2. Curation

Curation or merchandising is the traditional method of product selection. Bricks and mortar retailers have teams of people who select products to be sold, arrange them on the shelf, etc. This hasn’t been popular online because of the difficulty scaling. For companies like Etsy who sell hand crafted items or Threadless who sell Tshirts with esoteric designs (both hard to classify algorithmically) a curator with a strong point of view is key.

The team at Etsy selects a new group of products every day varying the theme based on color, content, or manufacturing process. The end result is a stunning set of images that are visually cohesive and add greatly to the site’s aesthetic. Threadless famously turned curation into a sport with their crowdsourced voting system.

4. Virtual Souveniers

Video games are vast repositories of 3D data and a couple services use this data to create tangible souveniers from our digital worlds. In this case the shopping experience is playing the game and the buying experience is a lot like visiting a gift shop at a museum. FigurePrints produces World of Warcraft figurines using 3D printers and character data taken in real time from the game. The Spore and Rockband Bandmates from ZPrints do a very similar thing.

5. Checklists

The most common method to customize a product is using a “checklist” system where the customer’s option are laid out in a linear fashion. This clarifies the process for people new to custom manufacturing and makes the life of the website developers much easier. All of the major shoe companies that offer customized solutions (e.g. NikeiD, Puma, et al.) use this kind of process. It isn’t fun, but is sometimes required.

The online shopping experience is quickly beginning to match the fun of retail shopping. The internet has already changed the music and media industries and with a host of custom manufacturing and personal fabrication technologies becoming available we will see similar innovation in “Clicks and Mortar” ecommerce soon.

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Tagged as: E-commerce, Marketplace, mass customization, Personalization, Retail, Shopping, Widget