Some Retailers Overhaul Websites to Keep Up with New Interactive Shopping Craze

In honor of "Cyber Monday," the newly appointed noteworthy date of the winter holiday season, it seems fitting to take a look at what's hot in the new and improved bag of online retailer tricks.  Lately, the buzz word is interactive!  We've been seeing a move towards more and more interaction on shopping sites.  Based on the belief that more interaction equates to more views, more time on site, and ultimately more sales, even many long established retailers have added interactive applications to their webstores in recent months. 

Interacting with customers through social media quickly became a staple in internet retail, but many have now seen fit to go above and beyond engaging their audience through facebook, twitter, and blogs with games that sort of resemble those you might see in a grammar school lesson.  Just a few months ago, a "fill in the blank" application could be seen on one major high end department store's front page.  Shoppers were encouraged to end sentences like "fashion is..."  Macy's has been going interactive by offering periodic challenges to their facebook fans.  Questions like "What would you wear to chaperone your daughter's home coming dance?" are presented to fans who can then go to a page attached to Macy's online store, choose pictures of merchandise, and make their own collage/outfit to answer the challenge question.  Other applications "quiz" users to find their style and then suggest pieces that might match it.   

With the advent of Polyvore, an application that allows shoppers or internet browsers to clip items from webstores and create their own outfits and collages, even smaller name retailers are now taking advantage of the ease at which they can hold outfit making based contests to engage audiences.  With today's new technologies, its certainly easier for young brands, even those without large development budgets, to get in on the interactive shopping game.

Interaction in itself is even becoming the very basis for several internet shopping business models - those who are clearly following the old Burger King adage of "Have it your Way."  In the jewelry industry, Sheyna.com and Gemkitty.com are two examples of sites that allow users to interact to create a custom product, but similar shopping sites have popped up for just about any industry you can think of from chocolates, to t-shirts, to bobble head dolls.

From social media conversation, to simple games, to interactive product creation, it certainly seems like interaction is the new sought after puzzle piece de resistance for internet retailers but is all the interactive shopping hype just much ado about nothing, a result barren quest to keep up with the next big thing?

Psychology and even Elementary Education 101 would tell us that engaging our audience will translate into more desirable results, but when the results we're looking for or straight up sales, does this basic principle apply?  The answer certainly varies depending on who you ask, and with all the different possible interaction, might certainly be hard to generalize.  Retailers like Nordstrom that seemed to embrace interaction head on by making it part of their landing page just a few months ago, seemed to have shied away, moving interactive features to positions of much less prominence.

Interaction may arguably backfire, engaging a less targeted and on the fence audience at the expense of distracting already buying focused customers.  One frequent online shopper called the new features "annoying and confusing" when talking about the move towards interaction as part of one of her frequented online department store shopping sites, begging the question, how much is "too much?"  One other internet shopper mentioned that while an interactive game on a site from which he he planned to purchase anyway "didn't influence his purchase...but was fun."  When it comes to internet retail, the line in the sand can be hard to draw but the numbers should surely tell in time.  For now,  complete the following sentence.  "Interactive online shopping is ________."