Online Shopping Gets Collaborative

Michael Garrity — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 18:35:00 GMT

Since the rise of e-commerce, shopping has become more and more of a solo experience over the last couple of years. But the e-commerce technology company BevyUp has been trying to change that, and its announcement of a new cloud-delivered collaborative shopping service moves that goal many steps forward.

This new technology will allow retailers to add real-time and offline collaborative shopping capabilities to their e-commerce stores, meaning two or more people can shop “together” with the addition of co-browsing, communication (via Facebook, text or email invites, text chat and/or video chat) and sentiment tagging collaboration capabilities that ca be added to any only store.

Plus, BevyUp will even offer actionable intelligence on a shopper’s product sentiments and preferences that help retailers convert sales and capture add-on and up-sell opportunities.

By adding a layer of collaborative social functionality to an e-commerce store, retailers will be able to better serve online purchases that require more than one decision maker, such as apparel, travel, bridal, jewelry, real estate and others, when those decision makers are all in different cities, state or even countries.

“Shoppers that want to browse and buy online with their friends and family are currently resorting to tools that were not designed for shopping – like Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, etc. – to try to make multiparty purchasing decisions,” explained BevyUp CEO Mauricio Cuevas. “The BevyUp service provides online marketers a unified platform that enables, captures and monetizes social interactions on their site.”

In addition, BevyUp will also provide “actionable business intelligence on sentiments behind purchase decisions that would otherwise remain locked up on social media sites and in email exchanges and phone conversations.”

HootSuite Tool Challenges Yammer

Allison Howen — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 16:30:00 GMT

Watch out Yammer – because HootSuite just launched an internal communication tool that enables organizations to have conversations without leaving the social media dashboard.

The social media management platform released the beta version of HootSuite Conversations. This tool is built on top of HootSuite Teams functionality, and empowers everyone within an organization to collaborate with real-time chat. The platform is currently in free beta and available to all users, including Free, Pro and Enterprise clients.

“Conversations is built on top of HootSuite Teams which helps visualize the organizational structure of work groups in your business. Conversations will increase efficiency between teams or departments and ultimately improve ROI,” said Ryan Holmes, CEO of HootSuite. “Now, true social collaboration can happen around campaigns or trending topics that impact business immediately.”

The Conversations platform also enables users to send social messages to internal conversations for teams to discuss and share. This allows teams to talk about response strategies, communicate approved messaging and encourages team members to broadcast across their own social networks by commenting, re-tweeting or posting content. Additionally, the platform allows users to import contacts from their personal Google or Yahoo Account address books, so that no one is left out of important conversations.

To join a conversation, users simply need to click on the speech bubble icon in the top right corner of the HootSuite dashboard. While existing users can automatically join conversations, new users can sign up for a HootSuite account in order to join the conversation that they were invited to. Basic HootSuite users can use this tool to collaborate with anyone, however, they can also use the tool to join specific Team conversations by upgrading to HootSuite Pro. Also noteworthy, is that since Conversations is built into HootSuite’s Teams functionality, Team users can leverage this new tool to assign messages for follow up, report on team activity and outcomes, share search streams and more.

'Net Features : collaborate

Online Shopping Gets Collaborative

HootSuite Tool Challenges Yammer