Online Shopping Gets Collaborative

Since the rise of ecommerce, shopping has become more and more of a solo experience over the last couple of years. But the ecommerce 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 ecommerce 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 ecommerce 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."