The internet audience increases constantly and rapidly. Along with it, the popularity of ecommerce market as well as the number of online shoppers is growing correspondingly. With the gradual development of the segment, the retailers have to invent new ways of improving online shopping experience by introducing innovative ideas: multi-channel, omni-channel marketing, e-marketplaces (eBay, Amazon), and at least discovery shopping.
Discovery shopping is quite new type of e-shopping, the first and most famous representative TheFind.com was founded in 2006; heretofore, there had been no similar comprehensive product search engine with a customer-oriented, customized and guided queries resulting.
Discovery shopping engines such as TheFind.com, Like.com, Pinterest.com, Tailored.co, Lyst.com appeared as a logical evolution of comparison shopping providing a possibility not only to check prices but browse by “prices”, “colors”, “stores”, “marketplaces”, “brands”, “payment types” in order to narrow relevant results and enhance customer shopping experience. The essential and distinctive feature of this shopping type is that it is targeted to provide as much relevant results as possible, so it can be described as a way of recreational activity when customers can browsing a number of similar or related products in a click.
TheFind.com considered to be the largest company in the segment, since it fully embraces consumers’ needs by displaying appropriate results among all available categories based on market supply. For that, the marketplace uses its “Product Ranking Engine” technology to provide huge inventory consisting of more than 200 million products from about 500 thousand stores. The implemented technology scans the entire internet to bring customer-configurable catalog to choose from.
At iKantam website represented another rapidly growing giant in discovery shopping segment named TheFancy.com which characterized as budding improved version of Amazon. Yes, TheFancy offers various promotions and discounts, but also unlike the others it introduced new cooperation program and tends to implement bidding system for gaining reputation and competitive attitudes among the merchants. Any web store or freelance merchandiser can become a member of this network after approval. There are no membership fees, only 10% tax charged once the deal is completed.
Thus, Discovery shopping can proudly be described as revolutionary method of ecommerce that made a great breakthrough on all shopping markets by merging a large number of online stores and individual sellers under the unified network.
