1. Crowdsourcing taps into the collective intelligence of online communities to complete business-related tasks that a company would normally either perform itself or outsource to a third-party provider.
2. There are several opportunities to leverage the wisdom of crowd in performing activities at a significantly lower cost, comparing to hiring a third party agency to perform those activities.
3. Some of the very interesting opportunities that I really like are
   1. Naming your business (Squadhelp.com) – you can get 30-40 domain name suggestions for as low as $10.
   2. Designing a logo or design (99designs.com) –great designs submitted from designers across the globe.
   3. Testing – uTest.com or usertesting.com for functional and usability testing.

In today’s world, it is extremely important to maximize the return from every investment and I believe crowdsourcing offers a significant opportunity in reducing the risk and maximizing the quality of your online business offering.

You are probably thinking it sounds cool, but does it have any practical or commercial uses in the retail and eCommerce space? Several retailers are already testing ideas with this concept. Although none have been widely successful so far, I see too major catalysts that could help take this technology mainstream.

First, the latest generation of mobile phones such as iPhone and Droid have all the necessary ingredients to help take this technology mainstream -  a compass and GPS to plot position, 3G mobile internet access and high resolution cameras. Second, the much anticipated launch of Microsoft’s project Natal can take this technology into the households. If you haven’t read about Project Natal, you must watch this video.

This is all good you say, but what about retail and eCommerce? I think this opens up several opportunities for multi-channel as well as online retailers. This technology has the potential to bridge the gap between the offline and digital world in a way that was not possible before. Ability to touch & feel products in the online context or the ability to see digital content such as product reviews in a physical store are all possibilities that are very real with this technology. Here are 6 use cases, along with some examples that would help visualize some of these opportunities:

1. Touch & Feel products while shopping online

One of the key deterrents to online shopping is the concern that users are not able to touch and feel the products. This is a concern especially for apparel items where looks or fit play a significant role in a shopping decision. How about a virtual fitting room where shoppers can see the garment on them, without actually trying it on.  The idea is to take some of the mystery out of buying clothes online — will it fit? Will it look good on me? — and let shoppers see how the garment might look on them, albeit on a computer screen.

Tobi has made a decent attempt at a virtual fitting room concept. Although it needs a bit of improvement to be able to see the exact fit and look, this is an excellent start and definitely has good potential for online apparel retailers.

Rayban has also done a good job in applying this technology so users can virtually try different sunglasses in front of their computer, as if the computer screen was a virtual mirror.

The common theme in both of these examples is that you get an online equivalent of taking your friends to the mall to check out some new products, all from the comfort of your own PC. Still not impressed? Here is another video from Cisco for more inspiration around virtual fitting rooms.

2. Bring the product to life in user’s context

Imagine if you are shopping for an item, and you are able see what’s inside the box in a life like 3D view. This is what Lego did in their stores by installing Augmented Reality kiosks. You can hold up a box in front of kiosk and it shows you what the set would be like, assembled. Not all retailers can afford setting up these AR kiosks in their stores, nor do I think the investment would pay off anytime soon, other than generating a coolness factor. However I do think leveraging cellular phones as an alternative to Kiosks could open up significant amount of opportunities that allow customers to “look inside” a box.

If you sell Furniture or Kitchen counter tops, you should take a look at how Ikea is using AR to try virtual furniture within the context of your own room! No more guessing about whether that mocha coffee table will go with that leather couch you already own. See it virtually, in the context of your own room, without leaving your house.

Another AR tool generating buzz right now is the USPS Box Simulator. Of all the examples I mention, this one has the most practical implementation of augmented reality that creates value for users. Basically, it allows consumers to virtually see what size box their shipment will fit in without buying the box

3. Bring digital product content to offline world

You are shopping in a physical store and would like to know about customer reviews, installation videos or other rich content that would help influence your decision. What if you point your iPhone at the product, and you immediately see all the digital content (reviews, videos etc.) layered on top of that object?  Layar recently launched a new Augmented Reality browser for iphone that seems to have significant potential in this space. The camera lens identifies the product, then serves up the contextually relevant digital information layered on top of the physical product.

4. Product Finders and Store Finders

At its simplest form, you could use an AR application such as Yelp Monocle from your iphone to find different type of stores around you.  This is a relatively straightforward application of augmented reality. However, imagine if the same concept could be applied to product finders within a store. You are standing inside a Bestbuy store and your iPhone app highlights all top rated products in the store which are currently on sale for more than 40% off.   Basically, the concept is to add a rich context by highlighting only the products that appeal to you. Whether you are shopping for a cocktail dress or looking for top rated toys for your kids, your mobile device  could make this a personalized experience by highlighting the products and the shelves that match your interest.  The below video from Thundre shows some additional product finder opportunities.

5. Interactive Product Catalogs For multi-channel retailers such as Bestbuy or Sears, this could be a significant opportunity in future. Allowing users to see a 3D rendering of the product from a paper catalog could bring this channel much closer to a engaging, digital experience. I would love to see a Sears Wishbook catalog where the toys come to life using this kind of technology:

6. Interactive Marketing

Several retailers and product manufacturers have started testing this concept to enhance the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns. Some of the current use cases are very rudimentary but seeing the examples below would help you imagine the future possibilities in the area of internet marketing.

Toy maker Mattel has added augmented-reality technology into a range of action figures released to tie in with Avatar, the forthcoming 3D film. Each toy will come with an iTag – a small plastic card that children can hold up to their webcam. When the card is recognized by the computer, a three-dimensional digital image is superimposed over the card on the computer screen, giving the child the ability to “manipulate” the character or vehicle on-screen by pushing virtual “buttons”.

BMW Mini tested a marketing campaign late last year using simple black and white print ads that would bring the car to life in a 3D view when held next to a web cam.

It is too early to say what kind of impact this technology would have on our day to day lives. I do think a lot of above examples would lose their appeal in some time once the “shiny” effect of this technology fades off. It is important to think about applications of this technology that minimize any extra work from end user perspective, and provide a utility or value that would otherwise not be possible. Even though above examples may sound too impractical or costly to implement, I do think that the stage is being set for a future that would see game changing and practical implementations of this concept in the retail and eCommerce space. Perhaps, the boundaries between offline and online channel will no longer be as rigid as they are today, giving a new meaning to the phrase multi-channel retailing.

You can make a safe assumption that the reason I am visiting your online store is because I have an intention to buy something from you. All I need from you is to help me find what I am looking for and then take me from point A (Product Page) to point B (checkout). I am ready to fork over my money if you show me a clear path! So it is up to you to decide how easy or difficult you want my journey to be. Need a few tips? Here are few ideas to consider:

1. Do not force me to register during the checkout process. If I click on checkout, that is usually a safe assumption that I have made a decision to purchase. Please get out of my way so you can take my money as quickly as possible before I change my mind. Don’t present me with unnecessary registration steps or other information that would slow me down. If you want to give me an option to register after the checkout is complete, sure I will consider it.
   
2. Remember that Google is not your target customer – I am. Don’t write your product descriptions or other content containing tons of SEO keywords with a sole purpose to please Google. Sure you need to focus on SEO but the product description has to make sense to customers first. At the end of the day, you might get a good ranking on Google but if consumers don’t understand the content on your site, you will not win.
   
3. Don’t let me add something to the cart if later you will tell me that it is out of stock. If you already know that something is out of stock, can you please show that upfront on the product page so we don’t waste each other’s time?
   
4. Do you have categories which do not have any products online? Can you please disable those categories so that I don’t have to click those categories, just to find a “No Products Found” message?
   
5. Just because you have a lot of promotions and products on your site, you don’t have to show all of them on your homepage!! Please keep the homepage clean and focus only on few key promotional or merchandise messages that truly tell a compelling story. If you have more than 100 links on your homepage, you are trying too hard!
   
6. It would be nice to know when I will receive an item – not just when you plan to ship it. You know my zip code – you know the delivery times with UPS and FedEx, you know your processing time – so can you please show me a date when I should expect to see the item at my door instead of having me do all guesswork in my head?
   
7. If I add something to the shopping cart, please show me the cart before showing any other recommendations or offers that I might be interested in. Don’t slow me down by showing 10 recommendations before I get to my cart page. I have a short attention span and if I get overwhelmed with too much unnecessary information, I might just leave.
   
8. If you take my email address during checkout, please make good use of it! For example, if would be nice of you to follow up few days later to check if the item arrived properly, and if I would be interested in writing a review for the item. I don’t mind writing an honest review – you just have to ask and remind me! Which is a good segue to the next point.
   
9. If I write a negative review about a product, please don’t go out of way to “moderate” the review to put a positive spin to my content. Please remember that customer reviews are supposed to be “unbiased” and any attempt from your side to hide or suppress the negative reviews is a sure way to lose trust with your loyal customers.
   
10. Don’t wait until the final step in the checkout to show me the final price including the coupon discounts, taxes and shipping costs. I would like to know that information at the shopping cart page so there are no surprises during the final step. If you need my zip code in the shopping cart page to calculate these costs, just ask me and I will be happy to provide that information to you. Which leads me to the next point –
    
11. If I have told you anything about myself such as my zip code, please try to remember it. Don’t make me re-enter that information at the time of checkout. There is a good probability that I will not change that information, but just give me an option to change it later if I need to.
    
12. Please don’t try to hide your contact information just because you want to minimize the number of customer service calls. If you have an 800 number hidden somewhere on the site, please display it prominently. Customers need to know upfront that there is an easy way to contact you if something goes wrong with their order.
    
13. When I am providing my credit card information, you really don’t have to ask me what type of credit card it is because you can figure it out from my credit card number. Just show me the credit card type for confirmation and I will let you know if there is a problem.
    
14. While you are thinking about that checkout experience, can you also do something about that Captcha! It is nice to know that you are concerned about our security and want to make sure that I am a human. But for the sake of humanity, please don’t make me decipher that 10 characters Captcha image. Just try to keep it simple, if possible.
    
15. If you display any AdSense ads on your retail store, can you please turn those off? That sends a mixed message to me as a customer. If you are truly an online retailer, your focus should be on selling products, not making a few bucks from customers who accidentally click on those ads and end up somewhere else.
    

Some of the above points may seem very obvious but it is amazing to see even large online retailers who end up building complex checkout processes, overlooking some of these points just because they have a “complex” business. If you think from customer’s perspective, they really don’t care about complexities in business – they are looking for a simple and intuitive shopping experience.

In the offline world, imagine walking into a store and you see clutter everywhere – the only thing that is clearly visible is an exit sign. However good the pricing is, if the store is not organized in a presentable manner, you are likely to walk straight through that exit door. Similarly in the online world, a lot of online retailers do not focus on getting objective feedback from external users on site usability. This is true especially for the small and medium size retailers who feel that things like usability testing are for the big guys who have a lot of money at their disposal. Not any more – there are several cost effective tools available now that would allow you to test and improve the usability of your site in an objective way, without causing a dent in your wallet. Here are 10 low cost ways to understand and improve the usability of your site:

#10 Five Second Test

Five second test helps you easily identify the most prominent elements of your user interfaces. People use five second test to locate calls to action, optimize landing pages, and run A/B tests. Basically, you can upload images that will be reviewed by random Internet users. Users view the image for just five seconds then click on the screen to indicate areas of the images that caught their attention. Using text fields provided on the screen, they describe what they saw on the places they clicked. This works from the basic principle that visitors have a very short attention span and they typically don’t spend more than 5 seconds before moving on to other parts of the page. Therefore, you need to get their attention to the most prominent aspect of the offer in those 5 seconds. This is a free service and can help you identify opportunities with your ad or other image units.

#9 Feedback Army

Start a usability test for your website in 2 minutes. Receive 10 responses from an army of reviewers for $10. This is as cheap as it can get! If quantity is your thing then you can’t go wrong with this site. However, you may have to throw away few responses because at $1 per response, you have to question the quality of some of the responses. However, if some is better than none, you can’t go wrong with them. I dug a little deeper into their offering and it seems the feedback comes from workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service. Started by Amazon, Mechanical Turk is the crudest form of crowdsourcing, where you will find workers willing to do small virtual tasks for less than $1. So is it a virtual sweatshop taking advantage of poor people from third world country? According to this study, the answer is no. An interesting observation from this study is that more than 75% of workers are from United States and at least 50% have a college degree.

#8 Loop11

Loop¹¹ is a web-based user-experience tool, allowing companies to conduct remote, unmoderated usability testing on any kind of digital interface. It is a good complement to lab-based user testing enabling you to quantify usability metrics with 100s of participants. Costs $350 to run a user testing project with upto 1000 participants.

#7 Chalkmark

Want to test the design or UI prototypes with real people? You can use Chalkmark to get powerful insights from real people to tweak navigation and layout. As the results roll in, heat maps for each task are dynamically generated. Clusters of clicks are combined to give percentage read outs.Quickly run a test on your UI prototypes to answer any nagging questions about usability. You can get a 30 day plan for $109 and create unlimited tests and surveys.

#6 Concept Feedback

Getting ready to launch a brand new concept? Would you like to know what other professionals think before you release it to the world? Receive quick, actionable feedback from a professional community by uploading a concept (a website, logo, advertisement or other). Each reviewer has a reputation score so you can pick the best feedback.

#5 Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg lets you create tests to figure out what people are doing on your website. Enter the URL of the page you want to track, enter how long the test will run and CrazyEgg provides one line of javascript that can be applied on your site. The results – you can see all sorts of heapmaps and overlays to figure out what people are clicking on and more importantly, not clicking on your website. For $19 a month, you can track up to 25,000 visits per month. Or for $99 a month, you can track up to 250,000 visits per month.

#4 Ethnio

For $400, you can recruit about 200 research participants from your website and perform a moderated focus group session with real visitors from your site. It works using basic JavaScript and DHTML so integration is fairly quick and easy on your website. When a user chooses to participate, a notification is sent to the person who will moderate the session. The moderator can then telephone the participant and then conduct a moderated session or a focus group session.

#3 Google Website Optimizer

Don’t worry about making it perfect. Brainstorm a few site variations and try them out on real visitors. Meet Google Website Optimizer. If you don’t have this tool setup, get it now. This is one tool that lets you test and learn different variations of banner ads, promotions, design and immediately understand which version is driving the best results. On top of that, this is fully integrated with Google Analytics and it is completely free! Need I say more?

#2 UserTesting.com


UserTesting.com uses the Web 2.0 crowdsourcing model to dramatically drop the price of usability testing. It lets website owners easily get pre-screened users to rapidly do usability testing of their websites. It only costs $29 and the results are typically ready in an hour. You get a Flash video of a user speaking their thoughts as they browse your website and a written summary where that same user tells you what they liked, disliked, and what would have caused them to leave your .

And the Winner Is……..

#1. 4Q From iPerceptions

Want to get quick, actionable insights from your visitors? Meet 4Q by iPerception. It is a free online survey solution that allows you to find out why visitors are at your website, and whether or not they are completing their tasks (and if they aren’t, what’s getting in the way?). It easily integrates with any website, requires only a few lines of code and best of all – it is Free!! The reason I like this the most is because it allows you to create conversations with your users using a simple and direct methodology and it can provide key insights in improving the overall offering or the usability of the site.