My colleague Jochen Krisch has been using the term “Live Shopping” in Germany for some time and I think it is a term that would help us in the US as well to describe the emergence of more engaging ecommerce shopping sites. The existing terms used to describe these sites fail to truly describe what is going on  Web 2.0 is techy and ambiguous, and ‘Social Shopping’ is related generally to  community integration like Facebook connect or user generated content like reviews. The emergence of new ecommerce concepts is bigger than just social. Over the last couple of years, entrants such as private event retailing, deal-a-day, innovative auction sites, viral widgets, as well as social shopping sites, have been shaking things up within ecommerce. Live shopping is a great description for these new ecommerce experiences because ‘live’ describes the dynamic and emotionally engaging shopping experience that is a common trait among them. Live shopping includes any ecommerce site that gives the shopper the impression that they are not alone, or when inventory is real-time or only available for a limited time, or the site has any other sense of user interface dynamism in the shopping experience.

Take for example the German site http://www.rabattschlacht.de/ (Rabattschlacht means ‘discount battle’ or ‘battle of price reductions’). Here perspective customers pay a dollar to see the hidden price of a product. Each time the price is checked the hidden price goes down by a dollar. If the customer likes the price when they check it, they buy it, if not, than perhaps they will check again later.  This continues until the product is sold, and then the process starts all over again.

Will this model succeed, I don’t know – but for some reason we are now seeing many sites with similarly innovative live selling techniques. Amazon, eBay and craigslist all created new ways to shop which have proven to be successful, and for some reason there is a girth of new ecommerce strategies being tested now. Private event retailing and deal-a-day seemed to have emerged as proven strategies that will be part of the future ecommerce landscape, who knows how many more of these other ideas will also prove to be successful. These live shopping sites are fun to watch as they emerge. Only time will tell which ones will reshape the future of ecommerce