October 22nd, 2007
The Boston Globe recently reviewed Kinset Inc., an online store start-up which claims to “combine e-commerce with the kind of visually rich, three-dimensional environment that have been made popular by the virtual world Second Life and such videogames as World of Warcraft, but that would feel familiar to a conventional department store shopper.”
We are going to watch this pioneering effort and overall space carefully in the months ahead. While we’re generally bullish on this space – primarily because of shopping’s inherent social aspect – the question of the public’s interest in shopping inside virtual worlds is one of many contentious subjects we have heard frequently debated at various virtual worlds conferences in the past year.
Interestingly, the retailers quoted in the article do not dismiss the experience of immersive virtual shopping (the point most commonly raised in the conferences we’ve attending, usually via statements such as “..why would I ever buy a book in Second Life when I can easily go to Amazon?”), and rather reflect upon control, ease of use, and payment issues as the major hurdles to the development of virtual shopping thus far.
“…Brookstone vice president Greg Sweeney says he’d considered building a store in Second Life, where such retailers as Sears have set up shop, but he was concerned that it wouldn’t give him “enough control in being able to shape the experience,” he says….
…Mark Stearns, the director of e-commerce at Tweeter, says he also considered setting up shop in Second Life or There.com, another virtual world, but he found the purchase experience to be too clunky. “It was like asking you to walk out of the mall and into the parking lot when you wanted to buy something,” Stearns says, referring to purchases that take place on outside websites, while Kinset integrates the trip to the cash register into its environment. “I believe that this is the direction that Internet stores are going – more immersive.”
This entry was posted on Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 10:26 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
