Virtual Shopping - You Let Us Down

-

In 2010, I had blogged about shopping online in my post Bricks and The Bytes. I was then surprised with myself that someone like me could buy air tickets, books to clothing from online retailers. This was no mean feat for someone of our generation who has witnessed the computers evolve to a common mans device. I was upbeat that bytes will completely overtake the bricks as far as shopping goes.

I have a dream today, I told myself borrowing from the famous speech by Martin Luther King, as wrote the post about the virtual shopping.                   

Having associated with design and construction since my college days I had seen the ins and outs of the way we create our shopping experience. I had dreamt that our physical shopping experience will undergo a paradigm shift from the way they do business and so will the online shopping. But what I have seen over the last 5 years saddens me. Our IT industry and online retailers have focused on expanding their customer bases and none to improve their experience. The tribe of physical malls on the other hand continued to grow and thrive unabated.

I have a dream that we could use the power of TV and Internet to select and pay for our clothes in a much smarter way than we do today. I hope there will be affordable 3D cameras available within our homes and devices that could take vital measurements of the purchaser. Those can transmits back that information in real time so that you could see yourself wearing that dress.

How wonderful experience it would be to see how well it fits or how suitable that dress is for you and all these happening in real time. The video in the clip below gives a fair idea of what things could be. There will be some ethical issues but those could be addressed.


I borrow from the same speech and shout out "Now is the time" to make some real improvement and take virtual shopping experience to the next level.

Comments

  1. UnknownNovember 5, 2015 at 3:30 PM

    Eventually this is what it should lead to. Only capturing a huge customer base will not suffice. The experience will be the differentiating factor.

    ReplyDelete
  2. sujata senguptaNovember 5, 2015 at 4:43 PM

    And how about the 3D printer that can print out the dress to me as soon as I have clicked on the check box of payment done?!

    All said and done, I am old school and I quite like the experience of a day out in a shop looking, feeling, admiring clothes, books and people.

    ReplyDelete
  3. UnknownNovember 6, 2015 at 3:33 AM

    I am old school too like Sujata, but my hubby who's a nerdy geeky fella gets excited with such notions too :)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Its True

-
Image
I was prepared for a call at two in the morning. This was to let me know that they have landed in the Doha airport. I had planned it well and slept early. I would have little time to sleep after picking them up in the middle of the night. But my wife woke me up at 11:30 with a call from an unknown number. This was to let me know that she had lost her phone at the Dubai airport and I was not to expect any call when the plane landed in Doha.  My immediate grief was that I will no longer have the luxury of sleeping till they landed, but have to go early and wait in the arrival lounge.  The loss of the Samsung galaxy made us sad. The realization of losing those pictures of our last vacation made us sadder.  Early in the morning I went to Vodafone store and blocked the number temporarily, stopping any misuse of the phone number. We had heard and read a lot of stories of people getting back stuff from various parts of Dubai during our stay there. These were firstha...
Read more

Maa Tripureswari

-
Image
A couple of weeks back I took a break of 10 days and went to Kolkata. It was a great feeling to be back and spend some time with the family after a solitary stint here. We took a step to further enhance the experience and made a dash to Agartala, the place where we spend our childhood days. It was an indescribable feeling to be back in the places which meant so much to life there after more than 15 years. Those were the places like my school, the streets, the play grounds, and above everything our home where I lived for so many years. I will not go into describing that aspect in this post. I wish to introduce two temples from my childhood land. The first one is the Tripureswari Temple the temple of the Mother Goddess of Tripura who protects all her children. The other is the  Bhubaneswari  temple immortalized by the great Rabindranath Tagore in his novel 'Rajarshi'. Agartala is the state capital of Tripura an erstwhile princely state now an undisputed and integral part of Indi...
Read more

A Miracle

-
Image
I was reading an odd article on a lazy afternoon when I came across the word “Miracle”. Sometimes we come across some stories that appears to be so real and at times we are confronted with incidents those are difficult to distinguish from fictions.  I was taken to a journey down the memory lane to more than 20 years to  the early nineteen nineties and I had just lost our father and I had left my job in Delhi and temporarily moved back to our home town. I used to spend my evenings hanging out with few of my classmates who were fresh out of medical colleges and doing their intern-ships at the government hospitals and also working part time in some private clinics. One particular night we were standing at a street corner with the doctors after their duty at the clinic was over. We were having some silly men talks over cups of tea and cigarettes. We noticed a three wheeler auto rickshaw rushed past us and the desperation of the driver appeared to be tra...
Read more